Drosera Petiolaris

Drosera petiolaris –

is a perennial carnivorous plant that grows in sandy soils, often over dark, fine-grained volcanic rock that sometimes displays a columnar structure formations near streams orponds, and its habitat is often covered by shallow water during the wet season, and is the eponymous species of the petiolaris species complex, which mostly refers to the entire subgenus Lasiocephala (petiolaris-complex).

D. petiolaris is widely distributed around Darwin, Howard Springs, and Noonamah of Northern Australia. They can slo be foud growing around the northern regions of Western Australia. There are also more to be found around, Endeavor and Lockhart Rivers of Northern Territory, and Queensland, and New Guinea. This distribution is the largest in the subgenus and the only that extends beyond Australia.

The linear petiole consists of a rosette made from erect and semi-erected leaves, with a color ranging from green to red. They can reach 6″ and are usually covered with lightly pubescent white hairs in the juvenile stage, then become hairless as it matures. Lamina are held at the end of the petiole with long retentive glands. The suborbicular lamina is red or orange ut I jav esen many rare cases where they can be full green. There is glandular tentacles on its upper surface that longer on the margins than are in the
center. The lower bottom surface is lightly covered with both simple and sometimes
dendritic form white hairs.

The inflorescence can reach 8″ and contain many pink or white flowers, each are about .4″ in diameter. The scape and the lower surface area of the sepals are covered with white hairs. On rare occasions, it is possible to find clusters of juvenile plants at the top of the flower scape.

Drosera petiolaris was first formally described by the Swiss botanist Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in the first volume of Prodromus Systematis Naturalis Regni Vegetabilis in 1824. In this description, de Candolle cited an unpublished description by Scottish botanist Robert Brown as a basis for his valid description of the species. The type specimen was collected at the Endeavour River in Queensland by Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on the first voyage of James Cook aboard HMS Endeavour.

A natural hybrid with D. fulva is known

(Name origin: from the Latin petiolus = petiole, referring to the long petiole