Pinguicula "Razzberry Blonde"

The flower is the point. Creamy yellow petals around a bright raspberry-red throat, with heavy red veining reaching outward across the face of the bloom: a bicolor corolla that nothing else in the genus quite does like this. Mark Rubnitz grew it from seed in San Francisco in 2017 and registered it as an ICPS cultivar in 2020, naming it for the two colours: raspberry and blonde. Exact parentage is undetermined, but most likely (P. gigantea × P. emarginata) × P. agnata.

It is a thoroughly horticultural plant, raised indoors under lights, and it shows its parents clearly. From P. gigantea, the largest of the Mexican butterworts, it takes size and vigour. From P. agnata, the white-flowered limestone dweller of the Sierra Madre Oriental, it takes the heavy-veined flower. From P. emarginata, a compact shade-loving species of central Mexican cloud forest, it takes a finer, rounded rosette.

Rosettes carry 5 to 8 oblong, egg-shaped leaves, each around 4 to 5 cm long, with slightly upturned margins. In good light they flush from dusty rose to deep mauve with beige-green undertones. Winter leaves are smaller and semi-succulent, a light dormancy rather than a hard one. Flowers are 2.5 cm wide by 3.5 cm long on slender 15 cm stalks, and the plant readily pushes two to four at once.