March is always interesting around the gallery: as expected, March 2022 so far is a cross between a frilled lizard and a common house cat. Not that this is going to last, because things are going to get weird.
Now what’s going on, you may ask? Well, besides the number of first-time visitors coming by because of their enthusiasm for Atlas Obscura (including one couple from Minnesota), plans for updating the front of the gallery continue. The current joke involves the front room resembling a Rainforest Cafe as designed by Peter Jackson, and that might be the understated version. By the time the front and the back are complete, most regulars won’t recognize it, and that’s the whole point. Now to get back to work.
One additional surprise: for the last year, the Nepenthes hemsleyana in the enclosure Bat God has been, well, a little fussy. Oh, it adapted well to its new enclosure, and it’s enthusiastically vining and growing up the sides. The problem was that while leaves on the vine grew as enthusiastically as the vine itself, the plant wasn’t producing any of its famous upper pitchers at the ends of said leaves. Instead, a new offshoot from the base started sprouting last December, and finally the first pitcher on the offshoot opened just in time for the open house. With luck, this will be the first of many, and that ongoing vine is getting trimmed, cut into segments, and rerooted to produce more N. hemsleyana plants for future enclosures. Keep checking back, because the front of the gallery may be loaded with more bat plants before you know it.
Meanwhile, the open houses continue over the next two weekends, with the Triffid Ranch opening doors on March 12 and 19. After that, as mentioned before, it’s all about the Oddities & Curiosities Expo show in Dallas’s Fair Park on March 26. (For the next two weeks, I’ll have a limited number of posters and a much less limited number of postcards for the Expo show available at the front of the gallery, so feel free to come by either open house to pick up yours.) See you then.