Nothing going on at the Triffid Ranch today, other than lots of long-delayed cleaning and organizing (New Year’s Weekend is traditionally a weekend for cleaning, and the end of 2021 includes a lot of packing), and nothing planned until the next open house on January 15. Go have fun, by yourself or with a tested and masked group, and we’ll all see each other in 2022.
Posted onDecember 30, 2021|Comments Off on Triffid Ranch Preparations For 2022
After the last two years, the traditional resolutions and promises for the new year come off more as daredevil threats: “My plans for 2022…” is right up there with “There isn’t a pepper too hot for me to eat…” The mere fact that a carnivorous plant gallery can survive the last two years, in Dallas of all places, is amazing enough. Making grandiose plans for expansion or renovation is ignoring the voice in the back room, sounding amazingly like the late Bill Paxton, yelling “I’m telling ya, there’s something moving in here and it ain’t us!”
With Bill placated, though, we can talk about potential plans. As I like to tell people, though, I had plans at the beginning of 2020, and they were all going perfectly when I rolled into Austin for the first show of the year, stopped to get something to eat, and saw the announcement on the television at the back of the bar that SXSW was being cancelled. After that, any plans became moot. “Man plans, God laughs” pretty much sums up the last two years, and we can all hope that it’s just laughter and not laughing and pointing.
Firstly, the big emphasis on 2022 is going to be staying home. That is, now that the gallery and its location are established and city leaders are noting its presence, it’s a matter of utilizing the space more and not using it merely as a headquarters for shows outside the area. This doesn’t mean that outside shows will stop: anything but. It just means that given a choice between announcing an open house and hauling everything out for a five-hour show, the open house now makes so much more sense. 2022 will also see an expansion on the outdoor Porch Sales once the weather stabilizes in spring: those are always a lot of fun, and this understandably eases the minds of those a bit leery about indoor events.
Secondly, shows outside the gallery are going to have to be a bit, erm, larger. Just as the separation of the Triffid Ranch and Caroline Crawford Originals is happening at the gallery one bit at a time, the same is happening with our joint presence at shows and events. That was already happening anyway, what with changes with existing shows and audiences, but 2022 will probably be the last year we’ll be sharing space at Texas Frightmare Weekend. After that, the plan is to move to 10×10 spaces, because the plants are outgrowing (pun intended) the standard two tables at Frightmare, to the point where well-meaning friends admitted that they didn’t stop by because “you were just so crowded.” This applies elsewhere, too: both the Oddities & Curiosities shows and the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays shows have already moved over to 10×10 spaces, and that’s about the only way to have enough plants on hand to make attendees happy. Sadly, that means that the little science fiction and fantasy conventions with which the Triffid Ranch started are no longer an option, but the way those have been changing, it’s for the best for everybody.
Thirdly, 2022 will be a year for telepresence. We just finished a major gallery renovation last year, and now it’s time for another. This time, the renovation is to make video streaming much easier, with the idea of regular events being run exclusively through Twitch and YouTube. The logistics on these are finally getting worked out, and the plan is to start toward the end of January. “I wish I could make an open house, but I live in Antarctica” is no longer an excuse.
Well, enough of that: with a promised thunderstorm followed by severe (for Dallas) cold this weekend, it’s time to batten down the hatches in preparation for the possibility of a white Dallas New Year. Go have fun, tell everyone about the next open house on January 15, and the plants and I will see you then. Go in peace.
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Posted onDecember 27, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas 2021 #4
Since the gallery first opened in 2015, the Triffid Ranch has made at least some effort at being open on or very near to Christmas Eve for last-minute shopping opportunities. The first few times, this was in the evening: a few people make noises about needing the gallery open in the evening, but realistically everyone is home and unwilling to go out after dark. This year, it was a matter of keeping standard open house hours, noon to 5:00 pm, to make things easier for those off for Christmas Eve but not to get in the way of family obligations. Whether it was this, the recent interview in the Dallas Observer, or a general pent-up demand for carnivorous plants, the last Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas of 2021 was the best ever, and I thank everyone who showed up.
Among many other things, this show found homes for several enclosures designed and constructed during lockdown, along with others intended to be picked up after the holiday season. This, combined with a tentative rental situation throughout the Dallas area starting in 2022, means that if you haven’t been to an open house in a while, the lineup of enclosures has drastically changed. (This, incidentally, is why you won’t see another open house for a few weeks: constructing new enclosures takes time.)
Once again, many thanks to everyone who showed up, both purchasers and interested bystanders (the highest compliment anyone has paid in the last two years came from the very earnest and very considerate person who offered to make a donation for letting her come in, and I told her what I tell everyone: as much as it’s appreciated, getting the word out that the Triffid Ranch exists is a greater help), and I hope that the plants given as gifts made the recipients as happy as you were. For those who want to come back, as well as those who haven’t been here yet, the next open house is now scheduled for January 15, 2022, from noon until 5:00 pm. Feel free to spread the word.
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Posted onDecember 26, 2021|Comments Off on Enclosures: “Professor Lindsay’s Amphibian Wedding Present” (2021)
Contrary to generally accepted wisdom, the first serious experiments in DNA manipulation and editing came not in the early part of the 21st Century, but in the latter half of the 19th. Professor Huxley Lindsay of Rice University in Texas never knew the word “deoxyribonucleic acid,” and would have taken a bullwhip to anyone trying to pass on the concepts of genes, chromosomes, or CRISPR editing, but he managed to tap all of these while experimenting with modifying “traits” in freshwater and saltwater fish. While his techniques are sadly lost with a massive house fire started by lightning, encouraged by freshly installed gas lighting, and facilitated by the entirety of his neighbors blocking fire wagons or offering to fill the wagons’ water pumps with kerosene, he succeeded in melding traits between his own children and their spouses and that of at least five species of freshwater fish and seven of saltwater. The freshwater Lindsays thrived for five years, until a heat wave demonstrated that Professor Lindsay had not included the ability to breathe air while in oxygen-deprived ponds and rivers, but the saltwater Lindsays thrived off the shores of Galveston and soon became one of the great political and social families of the greater Houston area.
Just as air-breathing Lindsays might have kept an aquarium to celebrate their aquatic relations, the water-breathing Lindsays started a trend in self-contained plant containers. Rated to depths of more than 200 feet, the first BathyBio container (registered trademark with one Cecil “Tuck” Kirby, an expert in keeping exotic animals and plants under strenuous conditions) was a wedding gift to Professor Lindsay’s granddaughter “Bubbles,” presented personally by the professor while in specially designed diving gear. Subsequent ones went to granddaughters “Angel” and “Betta,” and one especially large one was commissioned by a great-grandson, Hector “Discus” Fairfield, the first member of the Lindsays to return to land, in a reversed diving suit, in order to get his doctorate in mechanical engineering from Rice.
Sadly, while the Lindsays led massive movements in engineering, hydraulics, and social justice, nature stepped in. In the winter of 1983, a massive cold wave hit the majority of Texas, freezing Galveston Bay for the first time in recorded history. Among the millions of dead fish, all unused to such low temperatures, were all 2000 of the extended Lindsay clan, all frozen to death. To this day, questions as to whether they were delicious, and if police had apprehended one “Mrs. Paul,” are considered the height of bad taste in Galveston.
Dimensions (height/diameter): 25 1/2″ x 17″ diameter (64.77 cm x 43.18 cm)
And now the final Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas open house is live today: since so many people have the day off, we’re going to be live from noon until 5:00 pm. After the holidays are over, we have a major announcement, but until then…
At first, they were found on old, dead worlds. Massive chrysalises by the hundreds, seemingly impervious to cutting tools, waiting in alcoves and caves, surrounded by metallic fibers that slowly waved as if in a light breeze, even if in total vacuum. When disturbed, the chrysalis cracked open, with the monstrosity inside attacking immediately. Worse, its awakening set off chrysalises in the vicinity, and an unwitting exploration team was suddenly not fighting one or five horrors, but dozens, then hundreds, and then then thousands. The only thing each one had in common was that their armor was as impregnable as their shells, and the only defense was flight. Worse, the gladiators and hunters eventually died off, but new chrysalises grew from the webs left behind as the previous sleepers fell, guaranteeing that the world infested with them was perpetually dangerous.
Within five years of the first discovery on Bolander’s Bane, the assumption that the webs and their horrible fruiting bodies only existed on dead worlds had to be thrown out. Before long, the webs were found on hundreds of worlds, from ones completely covered with liquid water to ones completely covered with frozen nitrogen. An active research colony on the fecund world Kristobal Muñeca set off a colony that forced the whole installation to evacuate within 48 hours, and then then the terraforming project by the famed Fronimos team stimulated another. As the webs were found on more worlds, two things stood out. The first was that different stimuli opened the chrysalises: on one world, here proximity to a strand of webbing could cause the whole planet to explode in buried warriors. On another, they were perfectly safe until exposed to a particular chemical or wavelength of light. In all cases, any attempt to remove a chrysalis or break its connection to its web led to an inevitable conclusion, and few such bold explorers survived to share the results.
Even worse, the webs started showing up on worlds that had been thoroughly explored and surveyed, in places where absolutely nothing had been before. That was when researchers realized that the webbing, which resisted efforts to classify it as a true life form or as a particularly sophisticated nanosynth, was spreading. Microshards, often too small to be found and removed with standard decontamination techniques, were being spread throughout this galaxy and three others via pressure suits, tools, and boots, where they would root and establish when encountering the right conditions. As with the factors that stimulated their killing response, though, the “right” growth conditions ranged far, with no common pattern spotted by organic or AI researchers. The efforts to find a pattern, and possibly a way to stunt or remove their growth, became particularly vital. Last week, the first web appeared on Earth.
Dimensions (width/height/depth): 18″ x 24″ x 18″ (45.72 cm x 60.96 cm x 45.72 cm)
Plant:Nepenthes rafflesiana x sibuyanensis BE 3819 “Suki”
Construction: Glass enclosure. polystyrene foam, vacuum-formed plastic, found items.
Posted onDecember 19, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas 2021 #3
Well, Danny Gallagher’s interview in the Dallas Observer drew some attention, and the crowd coming out for the third Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas open house was quite lively. It was a nice mix between old friends and new people who knew nothing about the gallery before now, encouraged by the unseasonably warm weather last week finally breaking and making the place feel like a typical Dallas Christmas for a day. (Not that it’ll last: after Tuesday, we’re going right back to temperatures more suited for April than December, but it’s not like I get a say in the matter.)
As a little aside, because of the way the gallery is arranged to maximize available space, most of the enclosures are set on shelves to allow maximum enjoyment by people of “average” height. Because there’s no such thing as “average,” because I’m abnormally tall in an extremely short family, and kids are definitely outside of an “average” height range, the gallery offers several stepstools and ladders to allow better access to enclosure details. If you don’t see one, or if they’re all being used at an open house, please don’t hesitate to ask for one. (If nothing else came from a year of lockdown, at least a deep research dive into museum display design opened up a lot of considerations. Unfortunately, the front porch isn’t ADA-compliant yet, but it’s a matter of doing what can be done in the interim.)
As for remaining Nightmare Weekend events, since Christmas is on a Saturday this year, a lot of people will be off on Friday, so we’ll be open from noon until 5:00 pm for the last open house of 2021. After that, expect a big announcement on New Year’s Day, because things are changing very rapidly.
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Some of you may be making plans to come out to the gallery for the December 18 Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas, and some of you may be holding off until the open house on December 24, both running from noon until 5:00 pm. The rest of you are probably making plans for dinner next week, with or without family. It may be the traditional sharing for this time of the year, but the holiday season just isn’t the same without cooking tips from Canada’s answer to Doctor Who:
Posted onDecember 17, 2021|Comments Off on Post-Nuclear Family Gift Suggestions 2021 – 2
Okay, let’s be honest: it’s been a rough year all around, and most of us planning any kind of giftgiving looked at calendars this week and realized “You mean it’s NOT still August?” For everyone else, we’re looking at our list and figuring that lumps of coal might be seen as “ironic,” but we’re not quite ready to dump the litter box in their beds just yet. For you lot, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with purchasing things for yourselves, if only to take some of the stress off until spring. Either way, we’ve got you covered.
To begin, I was lucky enough to meet Nicole Pangas at the Austin Oddities & Curiosities Expo show back last June, and we bonded on multiple levels during our short conversation. Firstly, we Michigan kids stick together, and secondly, her hand-thrown pottery has a decided charm that you aren’t going to find anywhere else. (An important consideration is that if you like something, snag it as soon as you can: she regularly announces online popup shows through her newsletter, and the items in the popups tend to disappear.)
Some of you may remember Scott Elyard from the big discussion on designer masks from last year, and his Dunkleosteus masks are still available in multiple colors. (And yes, I wear mine constantly.) The scary part is that his recent Advanced Dunkleosteus & Dragons T-shirt is such a bad pun that it inspired a new carnivore enclosure. Go buy the shirt: I’ll pay him royalties from the concept myself.
Another crew met in travels to Austin is Bloody Rose Boutique, specializing in both brick-and-mortar and online sales of goth and goth-accessible clothes and accessories. I bring them up partly because they’re good people, and partly because they’re hosting regular Black Markets for related venues, and the selection is pretty intense. It may be a little while (most of the Black Markets that aren’t sold out almost immediately are either when it’s too hot or too cold to bring out plants and enclosures), but the plan is to have yet more reasons to cause trouble in Austin.
Finally, another Oddities & Curiosities cohort deserving of wider exposure and inventory clearout is Kaijuju Designs, specializing in, well, eyes. Well, eyes and donuts. You want art that goes up behind you on Zoom calls and guarantees that nobody will expect you to come back to the office any time soon, right?
To be continued…
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Posted onDecember 16, 2021|Comments Off on The Triffid Ranch in the news
Yesterday was an exceedingly exciting day (details will follow soon), to the point where an interview with Danny Gallagher in the Dallas Observer isn’t quite the biggest personal news of the day. Go read the interview anyway, and come out to this Saturday’s Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas open house to see what the big deal is about.
Posted onDecember 13, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas 2021 #2
This is now the seventh holiday season in which the Triffid Ranch has been open, and 2021 has been…interesting. Things have been remarkably quiet since before Thanksgiving, and this isn’t just about gallery traffic. Even the roads, and we’re close enough to Dallas’s notorious Central Expressway to hear the road noise, aren’t as frantic and frenetic as in previous years, and running errands on Sunday was a shock as to the small size of holiday crowds. I don’t know if it’s incipient concern about COVID-19 variants, a decided increase in online shopping, or if simply fewer people have any interest in going out this year, but for someone who grew up watching some of the best Dawn of the Dead cosplay on the planet at Dallas shopping malls through the Eighties and Nineties, this is almost surreal.
On a good side, that strange quiet meant quite a few people taking the risk of stopping by the gallery last Saturday, figuring that the relative lack of traffic meant that we and others wouldn’t be overloaded with visitors. That worked out exceptionally well, with many visitors just wanting to see particular carnivorous plants in person for the first time, and others wanting to take in the gallery’s unique ambiance.
One full weekend to go before the Christmas season ends, and we’ll be live on December 18 from noon until 5:00, and again on December 24 with the same hours. By next weekend, I should have news involving several of the enclosures, so make your plans now while they’re still available. And so it goes.
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It’s Friday evening, which means it’s time to get ready for Saturday’s Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas open house, running from noon until 5:00 pm on December 11. (If you can’t make that, we’ll have one additional Saturday open house on December 18, as well as a Friday open house on December 24.) This weekend is also the absolute last chance to get in any orders for custom enclosures intended to be delivered before December 25, but feel free to pick up a previously established enclosure as well. You want to go home with a Nepenthes rajah enclosure the size of a typical flatscreen TV, don’t you?
Posted onDecember 9, 2021|Comments Off on Post-Nuclear Family Gift Suggestions 2021 – 1
It’s that time of the year, and we’re all scrambling to find that one thing for that one person whose needs or interests can’t be satisfied by Walmart, so it’s time to revive the annual Texas Triffid Ranch Post-Nuclear Family Gift Suggestions feature. While it would be easy to give the obvious answer to queries of “So what the hell do I give that weirdo?”, and I’ll just note that giving the obvious answer is extremely easy if your Saturdays are free this month, generosity shouldn’t just apply to gift-giving. Lots of friends, cohorts, allies, and friendly rivals have great gift options this year, and it’s time to give them their time in the light as well. Keep checking back every week, because I have some beauts over the next few weeks.
To start, this year has been a surprising boom for book-buying at Triffid Ranch shows, and restocking has been a bear with distribution issues over the last few months. Aggravating the situation has been that several great books for beginner carnivorous plant enthusiasts are now out of print and otherwise unavailable, and some Amazon and eBay resellers have some rather precious ideas as to how much their used copies are worth. The good news is that you cannot go wrong with heading over to California Carnivores and ordering an autographed copy of Peter D’Amato’s incredibly influential book The Savage Garden: Cultivating Carnivorous Plants at a very, very reasonable price. Your gift recipient will be thrilled, the California Carnivores crew will be thrilled, and any carnivores raised after perusing this vital update would be thrilled if they could express emotion.
On the subject of books, although they may take a little while to get to North America, the second edition of all four volumes of A Compendium of Miniature Orchid Species by Ron Parson and Mary E. Gerritsen came out through Redfern Natural History about a month ago, and it’s to the high quality that we’ve come to expect from Redfern, with thoughtful and accurate commentary accompanying truly breath-stopping photos. (In addition, get in your pre-order on the three-volume set of Nepenthes: The Tropical Pitcher Plants by Stewart McPherson now, before they’re all gone a week after the pre-orders go out.) I’ll warn you that you might need a handtruck and back protection when picking these up from the post office or delivery station: the only limitation to such a profusely illustrated book is that each of the color plates adds to the weight of the final book, and I won’t put Redfern books on high shelves at the gallery for fear of their falling and possibly killing someone underneath. I mean, that’s a great way to go if you have to, but why expedite the situation?
Christopher Doll has been a friend and fellow troublemaker since before the Triffid Ranch was even a concept, and Twitch enthusiasts already know about his regular space art painting events, but he also has a calendar full of art created during his Twitch livestreams currently available. Yes, a copy is up at the gallery, just waiting for January 2022 to start, and that’s why all of you have to get your own copies as well. For all of the innovations of electronic event organization, sometimes having an analog calendar is easier for organization (in my case, particularly when I’m trying to check show availability more than six months in the future), and you really don’t need to buy yet another Dilbert calendar, do you?
Finally, on the subject of books, I’d be remiss in not sending people in the direction of Mark V, Ziesing Booksellers, out of the lovely town of Shingletown, California. As of the new year, I’ll have known Mark and his family for a full third of a century, and they’ve always been the perfect place to track down obscure volumes that make the staff at Books-a-Million cry. I also bring up that Mark has a great selection of antique and vintage periodicals of all sorts, including a volume of note because of the debut of its palaeontology columnist 30 years ago. Now go ransack his archive, and gets lots of gift certificates to surprise those cohorts that you thought couldn’t be surprised.
One of a series.
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Posted onDecember 8, 2021|Comments Off on I’m Living In My Own Private Tanelorn
Today marks a strange anniversary in these parts. December 9 marks a solid 30 years since I was let go from a job I hadn’t started at yet, when A.H. Belo, the parent company of the Dallas Morning News, bought up, shut down, and stripped out the competing Dallas Times Herald. At the time, my dream to work for the Times Herald (a dream held since my days as a Times Herald paperboy during the summer of 1980) finally realized itself as a mailroom position, back in the days when the mailroom was a potential gateway to a regular byline. The Sunday before I was supposed to start, I was having dinner with my then-girlfriend when the one and only Barry Kooda came by and asked “So, you getting a copy of tomorrow’s Times Herald?”
“Why? What’s up?”
“Tomorrow’s the paper’s last day. It’s shutting down.”
“Awww, no! I’m supposed to start work there tomorrow!”
“Well, I’d blow that off if I were you.”
I admit that I was angry about this for years, and not just because of the various details leading to that buyout and shutdown. For the next six months, the bus stop in downtown Dallas where I’d depart for various job interviews was right across the street from the old Times Herald building, so I got to watch the hurried stripping of the building’s marble facade and signage, the demolition of one wall to pull out the presses and other heavy gear, the crumbling of everything else, and even the overpainting of the scar where the building shared a wall with a parking lot with a mural particularly insipid even for 1990s Dallas. By the end of 1992, the effort to sanitize Dallas of any intimation that it had anything other than one daily newspaper was so successful that any trace of the Times Herald was one discovered accidentally, like discovering the stepping stones in your garden were unused gravestones. After a while, the only mentions of the Times Herald anywhere were in obituaries, such as when star columnist Molly Ivins died in 2007, and even then.
One of the things about starting a career as a science fiction essayist is that you can’t help but be immersed in the concept of alternate realities. The real fun is noting that the real changes occur due to the little things that set off the avalanches (remind me to tell you the Dallas Blade Runner preview screening story one of these days, if you haven’t read it already). A few years of little things, and the stories between two alternate timestreams go off further than with the blockbuster event. Today is a day to celebrate this, starting with the death of the Times Herald.
A few years back, I realized that my entire professional Day Job career was one massive case of dodging bullets, to the point where friends joke about renaming me “Neo.” Positions and companies fell apart, but staying, in the long run, would have been worse. Most of the time, the transition was painful — these things usually are — but necessary. Considering the current plight of print newspapers, there’s no guarantee that the Times Herald could have survived another five years had Belo picked its teeth with the bones: even if it had lived to see the 21st Century, the thought of celebrating 30 years’ employment there is considerably less appealing today than in 1991. More importantly, if things had lasted this long, I wouldn’t have had a minor writing career ending in 2002, which wouldn’t have led to my moving to Tallahassee to get away from it, which wouldn’t have led to my first encounter with a carnivorous plant in the wild. If the Times Herald had survived, I might have a minor journalistic career, but the Triffid Ranch never would have happened, and the people and places associated with the Triffid Ranch are so much more emotionally satisfying than anything I ever could have done while still working as a pro writer. I know I’ve made more money selling and trading carnivorous plants than I would have made in writing: two shows this year alone eclipsed my total writing income over 13 years, and the friends made in the process are people I’d never give up for the dubious promise of literary or journalistic success.
In his essay “Driving In the Spikes,” the author Harlan Ellison noted that most of the time, there’s no need to get revenge on those who wronged you, because they usually do something to themselves so much worse than anything you could do, and so much more satisfying. Instead of being overly petty, my picture has appeared in the Dallas Morning News multiple times, all of which making me feel like GWAR on the front cover of Tiger Beat, and all without paying for a print copy once in the last 30 years. That’s not a bad legacy with so many other things to focus on instead, and considering the Morning News‘s current financial and circulation issues, the real irony would be if the paper finally shut down or sold for parts a year from today, after all of the reasons why anyone would worry about a daily print paper in this age finish becoming irrelevant. And so it goes.
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Posted onDecember 7, 2021|Comments Off on State of the Gallery: December 2021
It’s December in Dallas, but you’d never know it by looking outside. Well, until today, anyway, after we flirted shamelessly with freezing temperatures last night. This is getting to be the New Normal: abnormally warm and still weather for three or four days, followed by a windstorm and then getting down to where we normally would be at the end of the year. It’s been great for those of us craving autumn colors (yes, in comparison to Vermont or northern Michigan, we’re pretty much coloring with pastels, but we also still have leaves on trees when those areas are buried in snow), but here’s hoping that the weather isn’t still playing this game in January and February. Right now, though, this weather reminds me of when I first moved to the Dallas area at the end of 1979, and it never stops being thrilling.
In the gallery, we’re much the same way. The 2021 show season is over and we still have months before the 2022 show season starts (both the Dallas and Austin Oddities & Curiosities Expo shows and Texas Frightmare Weekend are on the schedule, and now it’s a matter of looking at other locales), so the next few months are focused on home events. Naturally, the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses are in full swing, but we’re also trying to make plans for January and February events, preferably without interruption from another icepocalypse. First, though, is getting through December.
(And as an aside, because it comes up this time of the year, December also means the beginning of the necessary dormancy period for temperate carnivorous plants, including pretty much every species and hybrid native to North America above the Rio Grande. This unfortunately means that we won’t have any Venus flytraps, North American pitcher plants, cobra plants, or US-native sundews or butterworts until after the beginning of April. Apologies, but this is for the plants’ sake.)
For those looking for outside activities, there’s an ulterior motive for recommending the Dinosaurs Live! nature trail at the Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary in McKinney this month. Namely, after you come back inside the museum proper and view all of the other joys inside, head down to the lower level to see the Nepenthes ventricosa enclosure “Lagerstätte” constructed specifically for the Heard. (The last week in December is shaping up to be a week of large enclosures, but that’s still being negotiated.) It’s getting nicely stabilized and acclimated to the new conditions, and one of these days I’ll have to come down to note all of the extra details thrown in to be a wiseacre. (Among other things, the backdrop on Lagerstätte contains at least one real tektite, as a tribute to Dr. Luis Alvarez.)
Another item on the ever-expanding schedule involves those who want either an existing enclosure or a custom work as a holiday gift, but aren’t quite sure if they have the room or appropriate location. This is completely understandable, because most enclosures are going to weigh more than most people expect, and the holidays are stressful enough without coming home to a shattered bureau or table covered with the remnants of a carnivore enclosure. In addition to delivery in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area, consultation on the best place to install a new enclosure is just one of the services we offer.
Well, back to the linen mines: the next few weeks should include debuts of several new enclosures, including plans for one last big one for the Friday open house on Christmas Eve. If the weather holds this week (the last forecast was for temperatures this Thursday and Friday closer to those of early October), that just might happen.
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Posted onDecember 6, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas 2021 #1
Now that the out-of-town shows are over, it’s time to get back into the gallery and open up for the rest of the year. The first Nightmare Weekend Before Christmas for 2021 ran without a hitch (other than discovering that a previous attendee had a fetish for swiping plant identification tags) on an unusually warm and sunny December weekend, even by Dallas standards. Unfortunately, some attendees learned for the first time that Venus flytraps and North American pitcher plants need a winter dormancy, and that dormancy started last week, but that gave plenty of opportunity for the Asian pitcher plants and the bladderworts to shine.
One of the best things about ongoing events such as these is having the opportunity to debut new enclosures all month long, even as existing enclosures go home with clients and visitors. This includes the last-minute commission: anyone wishing a custom enclosure by December 24 needs to get in an order by December 12 to guarantee its completion in time for the holiday. (Naturally, anyone wanting a new enclosure after the beginning of 2022 has plenty of time, especially the week before New Year’s Day.)
For those who missed out this last weekend, please note that the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses are plural: the gallery next opens from 12 noon to 5:00 pm on Saturdays December 11 and December 18, as well as on Friday, December 24. Tickets are encouraged but not necessary: they’re mostly intended to get an idea of how many people might be arriving on a particular date, so we know how much we need to bring in snacks and the like. In the interim, it’s time to get back to the linen mines, because the empty spots in the gallery shelves need filling.
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Now that the last road trip of 2021 is done, it’s back to the gallery for the rest of the year. The Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses start this Saturday, December 4, running from 12 noon to 5:00 pm: admission and parking are free, masks are mandatory, and there’s still time to get in a commission on a custom enclosure in time for Christmas Eve.
Posted onDecember 3, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays 7 – 4
Finally, it should be noted that I’m always fascinated with fictional milieus based on real places, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the filmmaker Mike Judge lives in Austin. The Palmer Events Center definitely inspired one of his greatest films: between event security being absolutely absent other than at closing and a concession stand where payments for $4 cokes had to be made by credit card because employees couldn’t be trusted with money (and where the credit card reader didn’t work), I had to compliment some of the best cosplay at Horror for the Holidays that I’d seen in decades. To be honest, I was surprised that Center management didn’t get involved: it’s always good to see UT-Austin law grads and business majors doing what they do best. (It could be worse. For the first time in over 35 years, I had to sign a form confirming that I knew that smoking wasn’t allowed in my hotel room, because of the number of college football goofballs in town over the last two months who claimed they couldn’t read the “No Smoking Within 100 Feet of All Doors and Windows” signs on nearly every surface.)
That said, Blood Over Texas knows how to run a show, and there’s a reason why the Horror for the Holidays autumn spectacular has been doubling in size every year. Many thanks to the Blood Over Texas crew, fellow vendors, associated events (particularly the Bat City Scaregrounds crew, who regularly came by to keep people laughing), and all of the attendees who braved torrential rains and UT helicopter parents to make Horror for the Holidays what it is. Now to get ready for next year: I have a lot of peppers to get potted up to keep up with demand.
The next Blood Over Texas Horror For the Holidays show is tentatively scheduled for the weekend of November 19, 2022. Details will be shared as they become available.
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Posted onDecember 2, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays 7 – 3
Most of Texas is still coming to terms with longterm damage from the statewide freeze last February, and that includes the Triffid Ranch. A lot of plants that gave every indication of surviving when things warmed up in June finally gave up in October and November, and we’re all a bit shell-shocked over what the upcoming winter might entail. We might get an abnormally warm winter, based on every indication, but those same indications gave no warning of the freeze, either. Based on previous experience, we probably have about another three years before we get anything approximating significant snow or ice, but with changes in weather patterns over the last 20 years, anything is possible.
One of the big near-misses involved hot peppers: the original plan when the February freeze hit was to get pepper seeds started, and this came very close to happening the Sunday the first storm hit. Because of other commitments, that didn’t happen, which meant that attendees at the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays show last week got something other than carnivorous plants for their troubles, Both the Black Pearl and Numex Halloween peppers were extremely popular, and the current plan is to have a few more varieties from the Chile Pepper Institute available in 2022. This year’s peppers are going to get special consideration: after the holidays, any remaining peppers are going to become bonsai.
To Be Continued…
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Posted onDecember 1, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays 7 – 2
It’s all fun and games until someone gets a hernia. One of the many additional activities at the latest Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays show was a silent auction to benefit the SAFE Alliance, and the silent auction included the Nepenthes spectrabilis enclosure Weintraub Gate. Next time, Horror for the Holidays gets a custom enclosure exclusive to the show, as Weintraub Gate was exceedingly popular, and helped Blood Over Texas gather a record amount for the SAFE Alliance. Next time, though, I’m going to promote that enclosure with the proviso “Be sure to bring your own cart and transportation,” as the last thing you want to consider after winning a huge carnivorous plant enclosure is “how the hell do I get this home?” More things for which to prepare in 2022…
To Be Continued…
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Posted onNovember 30, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays 7 – 1
If nothing else came from five years of trips to Austin for the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays events, it’s an appreciation for packing. Every out-of-town Triffid Ranch show is a wrangle with making sure that everything that might be needed is there, because going back to get that one forgotten or misplaced item just isn’t going to happen. A cart with pneumatic tires usually needs an air pump at the worst possible moment, and being halfway through a show load-in is the absolute worst possible time to have to break to find a store with said air pump that’s open. Name tags get misplaced, shipping tubs break while handling, tables get left at the gallery, packing materials shift and allow fragile glass items to bump into each other for the next four hours…you name it, it’s been an issue.
(Many, many moons back, I came across a book on camping that instilled the most valuable lesson possible about long vendor trips. This book made a recommendation about backpack camping that started with doing lots of little campouts in the back yard or around the corner, and then pulling out everything and placing it into three piles. The first pile consisted of items used multiple times per day, the second pile of items used once or twice, and the third pile of items that weren’t used at all. The book continued, “If you’re smart, you’ll leave the contents of Pile 2 and 3 at home.” The obverse is also true: only with a lot of small trips can you recognize the items that you may only need once or twice a year, but that will completely mess up the entire show if they get left behind. That’s why the air pump always goes in the truck.)
That, incidentally, explains why the gallery exists. Above a certain size, not only do larger enclosures risk damage from road vibrations, potholes, and the Austin driver habit of rushing in front of eight vehicles to stop dead to make a right-hand turn, but that damage could turn deadly. A large enclosure full of live plants and wet sphagnum moss is ungainly under the best of circumstances, but if it fell apart during a move due to transport damage, that usually means irregularly sized sheets of broken glass. If that just happened in the truck, that’s an annoying and expensive cleanup. If that happens while actually moving the enclosure from the truck to a waiting stand or cart…well, the phrase “bled out before the ambulance arrived” runs through my head often enough that the enclosures brought to outside-of-Dallas shows tend to be smaller ones.
To Be Continued…
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Posted onNovember 29, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Blood Over Texas Horror For the Holidays 7 – Introduction
Five years ago, after years of sticking to events in the greater Dallas/Fort Worth area, the Triffid Ranch took a big leap. After being introduced to one Bunny Voodoo of a new Austin horror-related gift market called “Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays,” it made sense to start taking the gallery, or a portion of it, on the road. Specifically, the first test involved getting a rental van and trekking the 220 miles (354 km) between the gallery and Austin, the Texas state capitol. The bright side: Dallas and Austin are connected by Interstate Highway I-35, requiring no major digressions to the destination. The bad side: I-35 is famous and more than a bit notorious for being in a perpetual state of repair, upgrading, and necessary maintenance, meaning that a “typical” trip to Austin uses a lot more white knuckles, gritted teeth, excessive stomach acid, and expanded vocabularies of appropriate profanities than someone outside of Texas would expect.
Mind you, all of this is worth it. The first Horror for the Holidays show with a Triffid Ranch booth (the second so far) was held in a local club with a reputation for hardcore shows, and It worked beautifully for several years. Problem was, it became far too small for the audience, so in 2019 it moved to a new venue on the edge of Austin. After that, COVID-19 hit, necessitating a virtual show in 2020, and then the new venue was claimed by the city for emergency equipment storage, requiring yet another move. This time, it really moved up, relocating to the Palmer Events Center in downtown Austin, the same location used by the Oddities & Curiosities Expo crew. In a half-decade, the show had gone from a one-day gig with maybe a dozen vendors to a major event.
This time around, the venue wasn’t the only change. In the beginning, Horror for the Holidays ran shortly after Halloween before settling in the weekend before American Thanksgiving. This time, because of venue availability, it ran the weekend after American Thanksgiving, a weekend not normally known for horror events. It’s a true testament to the Blood Over Texas crew that not only did they make it work, but they made it work even with a torrential downpour the morning of the first day, and thunderstorms in Austin tend to be as wildly overacting as Dallas ones.
To Be Continued…
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Unfortunately, the Triffid Ranch Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas don’t start this weekend, nor is the gallery participating in Small Business Saturday. There’s a good reason for it, though. The Triffid Ranch goes abroad this weekend, setting up on Friday for the Blood Over Texas Horror For the Holidays showcase at Palmer Event Center in Austin on Saturday and Sunday, November 27 and 28. In the meantime, solidarity with friends and cohorts in retail, and the usual suggestion on an addition to the incessant Christmas music playlists:
One issue with raising carnivores that doesn’t get as much coverage is the issue with weeds. Since almost all carnivores need moist and acidic conditions, that means that the overwhelming choice for potting mixes involves peat. Whether it’s long-fiber sphagnum for top dressing or milled spaghnum for large pots, even ostensibly sterilized sphagnum has unavoidable seeds and spores, sometimes ones preserved within the peat for decades or even centuries. Give them the right conditions and they’ll come right up, and if not kept under control, they’ll take over and choke out the carnivores with whom they share space.
Exactly what comes up depends upon the source and the general conditions. For instance, most sphagnum has plenty of sphagnum spores, and if cared for, this can be a dependable source for live sphagnum moss. Likewise, in indoor enclosures, the main invasives are ferns, which are either cosmopolitan species whose spores moved on the wind or ones endemic to the area in which the sphagnum was collected. (Because of years of use of New Zealand long-fiber sphagnum, Triffid Ranch enclosures tend to get a wide range of native New Zealand ferns sprouting at odd times.) Outdoors, the main pests are marsh grasses, which attempt to produce large root mats on the bottom of pools and pots. Some of the invasives can even be other carnivores: sundews are famed for spreading seeds far and wide, and some people complain about the number of bladderworts that take over carnivore collections. (SOME people. Others look at it as getting two carnivores for the price of one, especially when the bladderworts bloom in spring.) Most aren’t a particular problem, but many varieties of invasive marsh grass need to be cut back before they’re impossible to remove.
As mentioned before, the biggest problem with grasses and ferns is the root system. Especially when they circle the interior of a pot, they form impenetrable webs that can’t be unraveled easily, and they flow out the bottom of the container if given the opportunity and spread. They’re also extremely tough, and attempting to tear off root balls like the one above is more likely to damage the plant you want to save. Worse, simply pulling the top growth on the plant just encourages new growth from the roots, so the roots need to go.
This sort of work requires a knife or other cutting device, and preferably one with serrated edges to rasp through especially tough roots. In this case, my best friend gave me a very nice Hokuru hori hori knife as a best man present at his wedding, and this beast is even better than the hori hori knife I’ve sworn by for nearly two decades. This one has a stainless steel blade that dulls much more slowly than the carbon-steel blade of my old knife, and it comes with both straight and serrated cutting edges. Suffice to say, the neighbors started to worry about the screams of “Sap and rhizomes for my lord Arioch!” coming from the greenhouse, and Mournblade here was a big factor. (If you don’t want a big knife like this, can’t grip a big knife like this, or want something that fits into smaller spaces, pretty much any serrated knife will get the job done. Spare steak knives at thrift stores are a great option, just so long as you aren’t expecting to use them for steak in the future.)
I imagine that this blade cuts through Pan Tang hunting tigers and Elenoin as well as it does through grass root balls, but that’s not something that’s going to be tested soon. Alas.
With a combination of slicing and pulling, the interior of the root ball is now exposed, and once the roots have been peeled from about half of the root ball, the flytrap inside is easily liberated and repotted. The rest can go into the compost pile or just on the lawn to be chopped up with the next mowing. Just beware if the removed plant has flowers or seed pods, and make sure to dump them well away from your carnivores unless you want to risk it happening again. Oh, it’ll probably happen again, at the worst possible time, but the idea here is to keep things to a dull roar so greenhouse collection cleanup is measured in minutes instead of days. As for sterilizing the sphagnum so it doesn’t happen again at all…well, do you have a spare thermonuclear device that isn’t working hard?
One of the best things about cleaning up the greenhouse in November is the color. Dallas isn’t known for brilliant fall foliage colors: with the exception of the occasional crape myrtle going red or purple, most of our tree colors range toward pastels. Carnivores, not being from the area, aren’t subject to the pastel rule, and occasionally go wild with late autumn color, as these Venus flytrap “Aki Ryu” cultivars demonstrate.
It’s not only flytraps going for brilliant color, either. The Sarracenia outside are also going into winter dormancy, and the S. leucophylla and its hybrids aren’t shy about brilliant patches of color as they’re shutting down. It certainly makes up for the temperate carnivores whose dormancy habits consist of going brown and shriveled in a week.
Every temperate carnivore shown at Triffid Ranch events has an ID tag that includes common name, Latin name, light requirements, a notice stating “Rainwater or distilled water ONLY,” and a second notice reading “Put into dormancy in winter.” The first question is always “so how do I put it into dormancy in winter? Do I put it in the garage?”
For the most part, in most places in North Texas, you can leave flytraps in dormancy in the same places that they frequented in summer. They still need full sun for at least 6 hours every day, and they still require rainwater or distilled water. They don’t need to stand in water, and in fact that’s a good way to kill them, so if you move your flytrap, move it to a place where its container won’t fill up with water during the inevitable winter rains. Otherwise, leave them outside: if temperatures threaten to get really cold, such as below 15F (-9.4C), move them to a place where they’ll be protected from wind, such as a covered porch, but otherwise leave them alone. Flytraps are mostly found in northern North Carolina (with patches in South Carolina and the Florida panhandle), so they’re adapted toward surviving rougher winters than anything we’ll see in North Texas more than once every 30 years or so. Whatever you do, don’t bring them inside for the winter: that winter dormancy is so essential for storing energy for spring that most temperate carnivores can survive a winter without that dormancy, but they generally won’t survive two winters.
The second question asked about dormancy is “how can you tell it’s gone dormant?” With most temperate carnivores, that’s easy: they stop growing and most of their trapping structures die off. Flytraps are a little more subtle, but just as fascinating.
The image above is of a clutch of the “King Henry” flytrap cultivar. “King Henry” is one of the largest available flytraps cultivars, and it’s specifically bred to produce oversized traps, usually at least twice the size of “typical” flytraps. During the summer, flytraps produce both short-stemmed traps that remain close to the ground and long-stemmed summer traps that raise well off the ground, and “King Henry” summer traps are some of the longest ones available. By the end of October in the Northern Hemisphere, the summer traps start dying off and shriveling up, and they won’t be back until the middle of May.
The summer traps may be collapsing, about now, but the traps around the crown of the plant are still growing for as long as temperatures allow. Even this late in the season, the traps may catch an occasional bug, but those bugs are going to be rare, and the trap may not get enough light to digest any prey that’s caught. All too soon, though, those traps will be there for nothing other than catching light, and older traps will even curl outward to maximize the amount of surface area able to intercept sunlight. Younger traps may still be able to close when stimulated, but usually no force on Earth will get a flytrap trap to close in the dead of winter, and you shouldn’t try, either. Even in winters so cold that the smaller traps die off, the crown of the plant remains green and continues with the mission of harvesting light.
About four months from now, we get to find out how successful dormancy was. This usually starts with new traps growing from the center of each plant, with older traps gradually dying off as they’re replaced by a new generation. If you’re really lucky, you may see a strange shoot coming from the center: these generally grow about a foot (about 30 1/2cm) high and then open tiny white flowers at the tip. Now you have something else to look forward to seeing in spring.
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the days are shorter, the light is more diffuse, and the daily temperatures steadily head toward their average low, which means for most temperate carnivorous plants, it’s dormancy season. For American audiences, a good thumbnail for the duration of that dormancy is “from Thanksgiving to St. Patrick’s Day”: for everyone else, generally winter dormancy in the Dallas area is between the last weekend in November to the middle of March. Between that time, flytraps, North American pitcher plants, cobra plants, and temperate sundews, butterworts, and bladderworts slow down, die back, and otherwise settle in for a long winter nap. They don’t completely die back: most at least keep a few leaves in order to photosynthesize all winter, but they’re not bothering to attempt to capture prey because there’s little to no prey for them to capture, and the expenditure of energy on trap growth and digestive enzymes is more than what they’d get from converting water and carbon dioxide into sugar and oxygen.
Because of their slowing growth, winter is an excellent time to get temperate carnivores in order. Snipping off dead leaves to discourage animal pests is an obvious one, and if temperatures dropped early, as they did in Dallas this autumn, repotting and weeding is another. It’s also an excellent time to evaluate how the plant will get through the winter. If it’s in a pot that wouldn’t survive a hard freeze such as with our weeklong blizzard in February, now is a great time to move it out of said pot and into temporary accommodations that can handle a week or more of freeze stress. (Toward the beginning of March, when we’re reasonably sure that we aren’t getting a major storm, it can go back into the pot, with new potting medium, while it’s still dormant.)
Late autumn is also an excellent time to assess summer damage. The 2021 summer in North Texas was relatively mild and mellow until the beginning of September, when we had a combination of temperatures more typical for August and six weeks of strong winds and sunny skies, meaning that local humidity dropped through the floor until nearly Halloween. If we got rain, it was very quick, as in over and done in less than five minutes, so patchy as to be completely unpredictable, and rapidly evaporated in the south wind. Because of all of this, several flats of Venus flytraps intended for next year’s shows were badly burnt in mid-September, and they weren’t expected to live. The plan in November was to go through them all, toss pots where the flytraps were expired, and try to nurse the survivors so they’d get through the winter. Considering the damage, I expected maybe one pot out of every ten might be salvageable.
Well, in a classic example of “don’t throw out your plants until you KNOW they’re dead,” most of those burned flytraps came back. Flytraps and their sundew cousins regularly produce new plants from offshoots from their roots, and while the main plants burned off in September, their roots survived and came back. Fully eight of every ten not only recovered but produced whole clumps of tiny flytraps, happily catching as much light as they could.
The real surprise was the size: most of these could have passed for seedlings. Since they’re already established, though, most of these will reach full size by next summer, and let’s see what happens after that.
As for the greenhouse, it’s now full of a wide variety of Venus flytrap cultivars. I may need to schedule more shows to find homes for them all.
It’s nearing the end of November, and it’s coming up on the 57th anniversary of THAT day. No, not the “back and to the left” day, although you’d think it was a holiday in Dallas. Maybe the next time Dallas gives itself a new holiday, we might involve a few more Cybermen and Silurians, just to be a little different?
Posted onNovember 18, 2021|Comments Off on Renovations and Refurbishing: “Bat God”
Next on the refurbishing: the Nepenthes hemsleyana enclosure “Bat God.” When completed last year, the hemsleyana in it went into replanting shock for a short time, but then exploded with new growth. Over the last 11 months, it made up for its lost time, to the point where it’s starting to overtake the enclosure. The only problem with this: for some reason, new leaves grow and extend well-formed ribs to support new pitchers…but the pitchers aren’t growing. Changes in humidity, temperature, and air circulation all do the same thing: nothing.
With many plants, the best option for dealing with a lack of blooms or other structures is to cut the plant way back and watch it regrow. With Nepenthes pitcher plants, the best option from personal experience is to wait until the plant produces basal shoots, often simply called “basals,” off the roots or from the lower portions of the stem. The actual process is a bit more complex, but the idea is to cut the stem right above the basal and let the basal grow to full size. If the basals also don’t produce pitchers, then the problem lies elsewhere.
All of this gets tested in the next week, as a new basal sprouted early this week and promptly started growing as enthusiastically as the main vine. The plan is to remove the vine and let the basal grow on their own, take cuttings from the vine, get those rooted, and see how many of them succeed. If things work well, this not only means that “Bat God” has a hemsleyana with big prominent lower and upper pitchers so visitors can see the famed bat-attracting pitchers, but rerooted cuttings should be established and ready to be transplanted in time for the big Triffid Ranch event at Texas Frightmare Weekend next April.
Any way this works out, the renovations and updates on available Triffid Ranch enclosures continue, as well as maintenance on previously purchased enclosures. It’s going to be a busy winter.
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Posted onNovember 17, 2021|Comments Off on Renovations and Refurbishing: “Antarctica In Decline” – 2
As mentioned last week, the relative free time opened up by the end of outdoor show season and the Venus flytraps and Sarracenia pitcher plants going into dormancy meant an opportunity to go back and renovate enclosures that needed a bit of restoration work. The combination of high humidity, high light, and motion from displaying it in multiple exhibitions meant that the centerpiece for the enclosure “Antarctica In Decline” needed to be completely redone, as the adhesive that held it together went incredibly brittle and fragile in only a few years. In addition to rebuilding and resheathing the main piece, a glass-encrusted resin Cryolophosaurus skull, the base needed some augmentation as well. It was still in very good condition for its original purpose, supporting the weight of the skull, but it needed something more.
Most of the time spent on this restoration was less on the actual construction and more on selecting the individual fragments of tumbled glass to be used: because of the vagaries of tumbling, as well as in breaking up the glass in the first place (the preferred method being putting a large rock in a bucket with bottles, putting on a stout lid, and then shaking it furiously for about five minutes), there’s no telling what will come out of the tumbler and if it can be used for a particular application. To add further interest, souvenirs from the old Valley View gallery came out of storage: a combination of sparkling wine bottles from the original gallery opening and soft drink bottles from the long nights getting ready added a contrasting green to stand out from the blue-green of the main glass being utilized for the skull.
Not that this is completely finished, either. It still needs some further touchup, particularly along the lower jaw. It also needs internal support so all of the weight no longer rests on the jaw hinge: this much glass is HEAVY, and much of the failure of the original centerpiece was due to pressure of the jaw hinge failing and distorting. These, however, will only take about an hour or so to finish, and then the final centerpiece is ready to be returned to its enclosure.
The rest of the enclosure needs renovation, too, mostly to clear out ferns growing in inappropriate places and to clean out dead pitchers on the Cephalotus growing inside. That said, feel free to come out for the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses in December to see the whole ensemble. Those who remember this enclosure from previous events won’t recognize it.
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Posted onNovember 16, 2021|Comments Off on State of the Gallery: November 2021
As of the end of the month, it’s been two years since the Triffid Ranch moved to its next stage, and nearly two years since lockdown shut down that next stage and caused everyone to regroup. Two years later, we’re still dealing with some of the shakeout, and we’re making multiple plans to minimize the damage, to everyone, if lockdown has to happen again. It’s been two years of learning the people you can absolutely depend upon, the people who know how and when to move out of the way, and the people as dependable as a two-dollar phone. All of that is preamble, and the plan is to gather it together and really get going in 2022.
A lot has happened over the last month, and we now have a little over six weeks until everyone starts screaming “Happy New Year!” and puking on each other. Currently, the gallery is on temporary hiatus for the rest of this week and the first half of the next, just to get everything ready and get several new enclosures ready for their debut. Everything starts up with a road trip to Austin to show off new enclosures at the Blood Over Texas Horror For the Holidays show at Palmer Event Center on November 27 and 28, with this as much an opportunity to talk with people about the possibility of a touring Triffid Ranch exhibition as anything else. (When working with living organisms, the logistics of where, when, and how to move enclosures takes on a special focus.) This will be the last show outside of Dallas in 2021, as well as the last show in Austin (so far) until June 2022.
After getting back and unloading, it’s a matter of getting ready for December fun. As in years past, the gallery will be open for the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses on December 4, 11, and 18, from 12 noon to 5:00 pm. In years past, we had requests to open on the evening of Christmas Eve where the requestors ghosted, but we also have plenty of potential attendees who can’t come out because they normally work weekends, so we’ll also open the gallery on December 24 from noon until 5:00 pm. (After that, it’s time to head back home and watch the best documentary about Dallas retail ever made with friends.) Expect a lot of surprises during the Nightmare Weekends, as the idea is to reveal new enclosures at each open house, and there’s a lot of enclosure ideas currently on standby.
After that, the beginning of 2022 won’t be a slack period, either. We just finished a major upgrade to wireless connectivity to allow better streaming video options, so the Twitch videos should start up again, and it’s time to start lecture events again, both at the Heard Museum and with DFW Tap Talks. This is on top of talking with other galleries through Texas about exhibitions and curated shows. Oh, it’s going to be an interesting year.
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Posted onNovember 15, 2021|Comments Off on Installations: “Lagerstätte”
It’s been a long roundabout trip over the last few months, but the future palaeontology-themed enclosure “Lagerstätte” arrived at the Heard Natural Science Museum & Wildlife Sanctuary in McKinney, Texas on Sunday, where it will have a long and successful life introducing Heard visitors to Nepenthes pitcher plants. This, of course, is only the start of the fun: to offer context, the Heard also gets a poster explaining the difference between the different plants commonly called “pitcher plants,” as soon as I have it finished. Even without the context, the new enclosure was already a hit among a crowd of visitors arriving early that day, and it may have to be part of a series. (Researching future fossils and what little would remain of our civilization 50 million years from now leads to a lot of intriguing ideas for future enclosures and arrangements, and those are all burning holes in my brain in their attempts to escape. Such is the life of an artist.)
For those unfamiliar with the Heard, the Museum is open Tuesday through Sunday, and offers both indoor exhibits and activities and a series of trails through its wildlife sanctuary. I may be particularly biased, though: the Dinosaurs Live! outdoor tour is something I’ve wanted to visit for years, and now setting aside time to visit is a priority.
No gallery events this weekend (much-needed renovations and general cleanup is on the schedule this week), but keep an eye out for some serious news from the Heard Museum as of Sunday. For those of you needing a proper Triffid Ranch experience, the new Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas schedule is live, so feel free to invite friends and family as well.
The various aspects behind the construction of a typical Triffid Ranch carnivore enclosure encompasses a lot of different disciplines, including museum exhibit design, bonsai maintenance, and zoo enclosure construction. Since each enclosure is intended to be as much of an art piece as a structure containing live plants, a lot of issues only make themselves noticeable after years of constant exposure to heat and moisture, and sometimes they blow up in a really good way. Today’s refurbishing/materials object lesson involves the Australian pitcher plant enclosure “Antarctica In Decline”(2018)
While “Antarctica In Decline” was a fabulously popular enclosure, it had a few issues that begged for a revamp. The centerpiece (above) was a combination of tumbled bottle glass (Topo Chico bottles, specifically, which produce a beautiful lake-ice effect when tumbled for a week) and fiber-optic cabochons for eyes over a resin Cryolophosaurus skull. As originally chosen, the yes were a color that blended in with the surrounding glass, making it hard to see exactly where the eyes began. In addition, the whole construction was done with what glass I had available at the time of construction, which wasn’t much. Another year of glass tumbling produced considerably more, of a wide variety of shapes and general sizes, which allowed a renovation that combined the feel of the feathers that were probably on a living Cryolophosaurus face with that of freshwater ice. In addition, the base on which the completed centerpiece sat was supposed to be lighted, but the LED lights installed inside never worked as expected. It was time to tear it apart and start fresh.
The real problem, though, lay less with the glass than with the adhesive used to keep the glass together. Traditionally, this sort of aquarium-safe construction requires use of either silicone, which has to be done all at once because cured silicone generally won’t adhere to itself, or epoxy, which has a short time in which to apply it and major problems with outgassing while it cures. The first time around, the idea was to use a supposedly water-safe cyanoacrylate supeglue, and that glue was definitely strong enough to hold everything together. The problem was that its manufacturers had no information on longterm exposure to heat and moisture, and water’s unique properties include the ability to get into microscopic cracks and expand them into larger and larger cracks. The upshot was picking up the centerpiece when conducting enclosure maintenance and having the glass shell peel free from the skull core and collapse like a stale tortilla chip. It’s definitely time to tear it apart and start fresh.
And that’s what’s going right now., New contrasting eyes. A drastically different adhesive, with probably a light coat of thinned epoxy to help keep everything together. A revised arrangement of glass pieces on the whole sculpture to make the final face more streamlined and recognizable as a dinosaur. (I loved the number of people who saw it as a dragon, but they always got defensive when they learned about the Cryolophosaurus connection.) In addition, it was time to update the base as well, with different colors and shapes of glass so it stood out.
In any case, for those wondering why the gallery isn’t open this weekend, it’s because all day Saturday and most of Sunday belongs to restoring an old friend to new glory. When the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses start on December 4, you’ll be able to see for yourself whether it worked.
Posted onNovember 9, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: The Last Autumn Open House of 2021
It was quiet, and it was concise. The beginning of November is always a relatively quiet time, when cooler weather encourages everyone to stay in and bolster themselves before the holiday season starts. As such, the last autumn open house for 2021 went without major issue, and now it’s time to get everything ready for winter.
The main upshot of last weekend’s show is that Venus flytrap and North American pitcher plant season is now over. Between shorter days and cooler temperatures, these, temperate sundews, and the Australian triggerplants are going into winter dormancy, so they’ll be missing from Triffid Ranch shows until the beginning of April. The good news is that with a long winter nap, all of these are more likely to have a good blooming season in spring, so keep an eye open for the 2022 Manchester United Flower Show toward the middle of spring.
As for upcoming events, the next two weekends are going into a massive gallery renovation and rearrangement, including preparation of a slew of new enclosures that will be ongoing through the end of the year. The weekend of November 27, the Triffid Ranch makes its last road trip of 2021 to show plants at the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays show at Palmer Event Center in Austin, and then everything comes home starting on December 4 for the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open house series. (By request, since Christmas itself falls on a Saturday, we’ll be opening the gallery on December 24 from noon until 5:00 for everyone who either has the day off or who wants to come out during lunch breaks if they’re working. Besides, December 24 is also Fritz Leiber‘s 111th birthday, and I imagine he’d have loved a party full of carnivorous plants.)
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If you’re in a need for green, the last open house of autumn is coming up on Saturday, from noon until 5:00 pm. Better get scooting, though: this will be the last open house until the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses start up on December 3. That’s the explanation for the break: it’s a matter of being ready for both these and the Blood Over Texas Horror for the Holidays show in Austin on November 27 and 28. You understand, don’t you?
Posted onNovember 5, 2021|Comments Off on I’m Living In My Own Private Tanelorn: Wimberley, Texas – 3
After writing about carnivorous plant issues on this site for the last decade, it’s always funny when unrelated discussions lead right back to the subject at hand. A week ago, the subject was on bee burn, where Sarracenia pitcher plants catch more stinging insects than the plant can digest, particularly at the end of the growing season. A little trip to the Texas Hill Country, specifically to the town of Wimberley, independently demonstrated why.
Shortly after the actual wedding ceremony was over, when everyone sat down with beverages of their choice, we found ourselves surrounded by paper wasps. They weren’t aggressive, but they were persistent, and gentle shooing didn’t do much to convince them to go elsewhere. They weren’t just going for open drinks, either: they were going for particular pieces of clothing or jewelry, and even particular shades of lipstick. After a few minutes of consideration, Caroline of Caroline Crawford Originals, official wedding jeweler and spouse of nearly 19 years to your humble chronicler, discovered that all we needed to do was set out a spare glass full of something sweet at each table, and the wasps left us alone to get a good drink of margarita sugar syrup or Sprite. In the process, we were making our own artificial Sarracenia without realizing it.
The explanation for the wasp invasion was easy. While larval wasps are enthusiastic carnivores, adults are nearly invariably sweet-tooth acolytes, with a diet mostly made up of nectar, honeydew from aphids and scale insects, and whatever other sugary treasures they can find. (That attraction to sweets applies also to more derived wasps such as bees and ants, which explains how you get ants.) To this end, the members of the angiosperms, the plant order comprising flowering plants, that don’t depend upon wind for pollination depend upon insects, and nectar is an extremely effective way to employ insects’ services. Between sugar and bright patterns visible under ultraviolet light, we have approximately 90 million years of co-evolution between insects and angiosperms, and all of the pitfall carnivorous plants use one or both to capture prey.
What’s going on now is the end of the wasps’ life cycle, at least involving these. Most paper wasps designate one female as a queen, and she promptly finds a spot in a woodpile or compost pile to spend the winter before reemerging in spring. The others keep going on as long as they can find food, but with local flowers fading for the year, the competition with solitary and gregarious bees and the occasional indigenous hummingbird gets intense. By the end of October in Texas, the few paper wasps that haven’t become food for birds, spiders, or praying mantises are desperate for any available food source, which is why they come running to uncovered soda, wine, or mead. Since wasps see mostly in ultraviolet light, they’ll also check out any item that fluoresces under UV in the hope of catching a spare bit of nectar missed by everything else, and most humans would be amazed at how many items of clothing, jewelry, or makeup pop under UV. Eventually, that runs out, and the few wasps that don’t die of starvation will die with the first serious cold snap. That cold snap arrives in Wimberley this week: the odds are really good that these wasps will be dead by the weekend, but as the political writer Charles Pierce says every Friday about dinosaurs, they lived then to make us happy now. And so it goes.
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Posted onNovember 4, 2021|Comments Off on I’m Living In My Own Private Tanelorn: Wimberley, Texas – 2
On a recent trip to Wimberley, Texas, you’d think there would be a lot of time to photograph Texas flora, and that would be true if there wasn’t a wedding going on. There was still time for a few snaps, but a more extensive look at the plants of the Hill Country requires more time, preferably during blooming season in spring. Even so, there was plenty to see.
Mangueys aren’t necessarily native to the area, but they grow extremely well in Central Texas. Not only are they impressive additions to rock gardens, but their tough leaves and sharp spines discourage everyone but humans from messing with them.
Want a touch of international floral history? Here’s why prickly pear cactus were introduced to Australia: members of the genus Opuntia are hosts for the cochineal bug, the source for the colorant carmine. Said bugs produce a white fluffy camouflage to protect against wasps and other predators and parasites, and by the end of the growing season, it can get a little thick.
Wimberley may be in the middle of semi-desert, but with suitable water harvesting capacity, it can be awfully friendly to other tropicals. This little pond at the wedding site both utilizes local limestone (usually so festooned with holes and small tunnels that it’s often sold in aquarium shops as “holey rock”) and just the right amount of water lilies and papyrus to make it magical both during the day and when lit at night.
While one of Texas’s many clichés involves it being covered with cactus (particularly the saguaro, which is only found in Arizona), cactus is just part of the wide range of trees, shrubs, grasses, and herbs growing in the state’s desert and semidesert regions. Most cactus spread their seeds via fruit-eating birds, and sometimes there’s no telling what will show up where. This little one was underneath a combination of “cedar” (actually Ashe’s juniper, Juniperus ashei, the source of winter allergies throughout the state) and mesquite, so it might not last long, but it just might if the area around it is cleared by fire or human action. Either way, good luck to it.
To be continued…
Comments Off on I’m Living In My Own Private Tanelorn: Wimberley, Texas – 2
Okay, so last weekend, two of my best friends got married. They’d been connected via a wide net of mutual friends and acquaintances for the last three decades, but they first met in person while attending the very first Triffid Ranch open house in 2015, and it’s all been downhill from there. They eventually set a time and a place for a wedding celebration, and the time was the one time where the place was at its absolute best. The place was the town of Wimberley, Texas, due west of San Marcos, south of Austin, and right in the middle of the famed Texas Hill Country in the center of the state.
This wasn’t the first time I’d been to Wimberley, but it had been, erm, a little bit of time since the last visit. Wimberley was on the map for decades due to its art galleries, particularly those showcasing its glass artists, as well as its bonsai nursery. The last reason I’d had to be in Wimberley in the last third of a century, though, was for the long-defunct Wimberley Hillacious bicycle race, competing through the 1980s as a worthy competitor for the Hotter ‘n Hell Hundred bike race in Wichita Falls. (The Wimberley race was in October, thereby bypassing both the brutal heat of summer and the equally brutal cedar allergy season of December and January. However, it was a bit more of a challenge both because of its impressive hills and the equally impressive headwinds, and a 10-mile race in Wimberley was as much of a workout as the 50-mile in Wichita Falls.) Let’s just say that Wimberley has changed just a little bit since then.
In the last 33 years, Wimberley became a lot less isolated, particularly as far as Austin gentrifiers were concerned. (As we discovered on our second night in town, when the wine mom getaway contingent in the adjoining lodge room decided to climb atop the building and stomp across the roof at midnight. The next morning, they gave every indication that “being so hung over that they couldn’t remember their names when checking out of the hotel” was a default state.) Back in 2011, the area was hit particularly hard by the last big statewide drought, with water having to be shipped in by truck to keep people from dying, so most new businesses and subdivisions had extensive water harvesting towers, as did schools and hotels. Likewise, highways and sideroads were recently expanded as much as possible to handle the increased traffic, giving Wimberley the same general vibe as areas around Dallas in the Eighties. On top of everything was the realization that the gap between the usual summer heat and the influx of cold winter weather was going to be extremely short in 2021, and the Halloween festivities in town gave a note of fervency, because the period between needing sunscreen and hats and needing heavy jackets and gloves wasn’t going to last for long.
To cut to the punchline, the wedding went through without problems, from the bagpiper opening everything to most of the guests coming in costume because of the season. (The bride was so far away from being a Bridezilla that we all joked about asking the piper if he could play an appropriate theme for her arrival.) Yeah, the best man looked as if he stole Boris Johnson’s toupee, but that couldn’t be helped thanks to the lack of humidity. 10/10; would attend again.
Incoming: Report from the Archaeologist Guild, 91198312-1145
Abstract: Description of a uniquely preserved fossil bed dating approximately 65 million years before the present
Details: While the fact that our planet once had an extensive civilization across all major landmasses has been established for at least 60 years, that civilization is still poorly understood. Due to extensive chemical weathering of the surface, the traces of what is commonly referred to as “Civilization Q” consist predominately of metal oxides and a layer of microplastics found on the same bedding horizon in both land and ocean tectonic plates and cratons. This has changed significantly with the discovery of a large fossil bed found at coordinates (redacted), dated to within twenty years of the most recent microplastics deposits known. The bed preserves significant examples of noncontemporary plastics, glasses, and metals, including the earliest known examples of silicones, exceptionally well-preserved iron and aluminum alloys, and traces of artificially produced radioisotopes including uranium, cesium, and plutonium. Most surprisingly, the deposit includes both preserved machine components and structural frameworks of now-extinct organic forms, both sessile and motile examples, preserved either as impression molds or as silica replacement of empty molds.
The main deposit is one slab, detached from a higher layer on cliffs at (redacted), which appears to be a sudden accumulation of materials from a sudden event such as a flood or avalanche. The majority of the fossils in this slab are relatively unweathered plastics, mostly nylon and polyethylenes, but a significant number of unweathered metals including copper, gold, iron, aluminum, tungsten, and neodymium-boron composites. Glasses are relatively rare but exist both as shaped and amorphous pieces. Most of the fossils are disassociated forms, but some show examples of early articulation and control structures, as well as traces of power systems. Reconstruction of the original forms is necessarily speculative due to extensive damage to structures before preservation, but some structures suggest final constructs of extensive size, something that was not suspected previously at such an early stage.
The blend of synthetic and organic fossils was also surprising: most fossil beds from that general time period are comprised completely of organic forms. Most interestingly, strata immediately above this bed preserve examples of early machines dating to shortly after both sessile and motile organic forms had become extinct, and no examples of organic forms are known in more recent fossil beds. This site may possibly not only include information on Civilization Q, but on the early evolution and development of mechanical and electronic life on this planet, including our own. Our only hope for more clarification on our early history comes from finding more sites such as this, as rare as they may be.
Dimensions (width/height/depth): 18″ x 36″ x 18″ (45.72 cm x 91.44 cm x 45.72 cm)
Plant:Nepenthes ventricosa
Construction: Glass enclosure. polystyrene foam, found items.
Posted onNovember 1, 2021|Comments Off on Ongoing Triffid Ranch fun in 2022
The official announcement came out today, so it’s time to note that the Texas Triffid Ranch returns to the Oddities & Curiosities Expo in 2022: Dallas at Fair Park on March 26, and the Palmer Event Center on June 18. And now to start getting ready.
As appropriate as it would be to have a gallery event on Halloween weekend, the gallery goes quiet this weekend in order for your hardworking proprietors to attend the wedding of two of our best and oldest friends. Don’t worry, though: we’ll be back. We always come back.
For those with Sarracenia pitcher plants in the Dallas area, we’re rapidly coming up on that time of the year where the plants start slowing down and slipping into winter dormancy. In the meantime, though, the plants take advantage of the light, warm temperatures, and available insects as much as they can. Autumn is traditionally when Sarracenia plants produce their largest, brightest and most vibrant pitchers, and this coincides with many prey insects needing to finish their life cycles before impending cold kills them. Alternately, many insects, such as paper wasps, are now at loose ends: their nests have produced all of the new wasps that they’re going to produce, and one or two of those wasps will find a good spot in a woodpile or compost pile to hibernate and perpetuate the species. The rest, though, will wander off from the nest in search of food. Adult paper wasps predominately feed on nectar and other sweets, and they face increasing competition from moths, bees, flies, and every other insect facing starvation as flowers die off or go to seed. As October ends, the voluminous nectar produced by Sarracenia becomes about the only source of nectar in the area, and many insects that would otherwise stay away find themselves caught at the bottom of a pitcher, buried among both the still-living and the dead.
A point of further research on Sarracenia growth is exactly how much additional nitrogen and phosphorus plants get from insects caught at the end of autumn. While many of the pitchers grown the previous spring die off when the plant goes into dormancy, the autumn pitchers may look a bit ragged over the winter, but they still remain green into the next spring. This is a vital part of that dormancy: every last photon those pitchers can catch over the winter contributes to a storage of starch in the plant’s rhizomes, allowing enough energy to bloom once winter is over and then produce the first spring pitchers. The surprising part isn’t that they stay green even in remarkably cold weather: during last February’s week-long Icepocalypse, temperatures that killed so many other plants freezerburned the tops of pitchers at the Triffid Ranch growing area but left everything below them intact. What’s surprising is how, well, juicy those pitchers were. When trimming back severely damaged fall pitchers at different times over the winter, not only were so many of those pitchers completely packed with trapped insect corpses, but they dripped impressive amounts of what could be called either “compost tea” or “insect broth” out of the cut ends, A note to grad students seeking a research paper topic: check exactly how much of this carnivore compost tea is produced over a winter, how much nitrogen and phosphorus is in that digested soup, and how much of a difference in growth this makes to the parent plant in spring.
As mentioned before, the main insects trapped are nectar-eaters: bees, wasps, flies, moths (much more so with Sarracenia leucophylla pitchers, because of their fluorescence under moonlight), male and female mosquitoes, and ladybugs. (Some may have issues with ladybugs and other beneficial-to-humans insects being caught by pitcher plants, but the overwhelming majority seen on an anecdotal basis in Dallas-area pitchers are of the Asian lady beetle, Harmonia axyridis, which are an invasive pest. And so it goes.) It stands to reason that the nectar would attract other animals attracted to sweets, limited only by the size and diameter of the pitcher attracting them. And when the pitcher is large enough to handle really large prey, things get interesting.
Over the last few weeks, a Sarracenia leucophylla hybrid intended for upcoming plant shows started producing really impressively sized pitchers, with one pitcher with a mouth nearly two inches (5.08 cm) across. That pitcher opened approximately two weeks ago, and then bent in half and fell over in a storm. The cause of that failure was from what I euphemistically call “bee burn,” In native environments, Sarracenia process trapped prey by drawing up water in their pitchers both to drown prey and to encourage bacterial action that digests the insects and allows the residue to be absorbed through digestive glands on the inside of pitcher. When the humidity is extremely low, as tends to be a problem in North Texas in October, the plant cannot draw up enough water to process trapped prey, meaning that it rots and kills off portions of the pitcher wall. (I call it “bee burn” not only because the main causes are from collections of bees or wasps caught all at once, but because bees and wasps have strong enough jaws to tear a hole through the damaged pitcher wall and escape. This can make displaying plants at events extremely entertaining.) A quick observation confirmed that the pitcher failure was caused by just that.
The surprising part was that the pitcher wall had actually ruptured when it folded over, revealing the exoskeleton of the insect causing that case of bee burn. As opposed to the expected large wasp, a glint of metallic green peeked out. What had this pitcher caught that contributed to its failure?
Whatever it was, it was big, at least in comparison to most of the insects caught by a typical Sarracenia pitcher.
At this point, both the corpse and the surrounding pitcher wall had dried to the point where a dissection of the pitcher side was easy, and most of the corpse popped out.
The victim wasn’t immediately obvious to most, but it was one I recognized. It was a particularly large Cotinis mutabilis, a local scarab also known as “peach beetle,” “green June bug,” and “figeater beetle”, the first and last common names coming from its attracting to ripe or overripe fruit. This last summer, because of the unusual rains in August in particular, was a good one for a lot of fruit trees, especially peaches, and a neighbor’s peach tree became quite the target for local squirrels. Since the squirrels are really good about plucking a fruit, taking three bites out of it, dropping it, and getting another, this brought out a following wave of peach beetles to clean up the mess. A few turned up in raincatcher meshes after heavy rains in August, suggesting that they had as good a year as the peach trees, and apparently one laggard in October decided to check out the sweet scents coming from this pitcher and trapped itself.
The good news is that the beetle turned to soup, but not before its decomposition damaged the pitcher plant. The better news is that at least it was a peach beetle and not one of the local ox beetles. Considering a typical ox beetle’s strength, I’d be surprised if even a late-season pitcher would be strong enough to contain it.
Posted onOctober 27, 2021|Comments Off on The Next Triffid Ranch Open House: November 6, 2021
Momentary resurfacing: because of shifting schedules and upcoming developments, the next Triffid Ranch gallery open house is now scheduled for Saturday, November 6, 2021, running from noon to 5:00 pm. (Now that the risk of extreme heat is gone for maybe the next five months, there’s no especial reason to open in the early morning, and the later hours give more opportunities for people constrained by work schedules.) Admission is still free and masks are still mandatory: those factors haven’t changed.
So why the doughnuts? It’s a challenge to friend and Central Track founder Pete Freedman. Pete recently handed over daily operations of Central Track to a new crew in order to focus on a new job: I’ve been nagging him for five years to come out to an open house, and between schedules and pandemic, he’s never had the opportunity. The doughnuts are because at the roughest point in last year’s lockdown, Pete was having to lay off staff and shut down nonvital operations, and I asked if there was anything I could do to help out. “Send doughnuts,” he said, so I picked up a dozen and drove out to his apartment, donned a mask, and delivered them personally. The hope is that he’ll be tempted by the best from Donut Palace, the best doughnut shop on the east side of Dallas (and regular supplier for the crew at Texas Frightmare Weekend on Sunday mornings) and come out to say hello. Alas, it didn’t work at the last open house, so here’s hoping he’ll come out of his burrow like a bearded Gila monster and investigate further. And if any other members of the working press want to beat Pete to the doughnuts, well, that’s why I’m bringing enough for everybody.
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Posted onOctober 26, 2021|Comments Off on Public Service Announcement: Commissions
It’s nearly impossible to to avoid the ongoing news about issues with supply chains and imports, and the Triffid Ranch is just as effected as everyone else. Because of this, it’s time to make the uncomfortable but necessary announcement that anyone seeking a carnivorous plant enclosure commission needs to make plans to discuss the design as quickly as possible, just to make sure that the desired size enclosure and plant can be available in time. Likewise, as of now, any commission requested after November 28 cannot be guaranteed to be completed in time for the holidays. I apologize for the inconvenience, but if you plan to give a gift of a custom Triffid Ranch enclosure, get in your request NOW to guarantee that a construction spot is available. (If it doesn’t need to be a commission, a wide range of carnivore enclosures are already available at the gallery for purchase or rental.)
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Posted onOctober 25, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: The Last October Open House of 2021
After the events of the last two months, it would have been completely reasonable to assume that we needed a break and scheduled the next Triffid Ranch event later in the year. That said, being able to open up helped with a lot of issues, and a lot of new faces helped even more. Many thanks to everyone who came out this last weekend, because your presence really helped out.
This time around, carnivorous plants weren’t the only options, and a plan to add hot peppers to the mix almost didn’t happen. (A Day Job trip to New Jersey delayed getting pepper seeds started at the beginning of February, and any seedlings started then would have died in the Great Icepocalypse of 2021. Everything worked out.) This year, the idea was to start off with dark peppers: the USDA-developed “Black Pearl” (black fruit when unripe, ruby red when ripe) and the Chili Pepper Institute-developed “Numex Halloween” (black fruit when unripe, orange when ripe), both recommended for your next batch of goth salsa. The initial experiment worked exceedingly well, and the plan is to move to several new varieties in 2022 to spice things up (huhr huhr)
Besides the peppers, the feeling was a little bittersweet, and only because of the shortening days. Right now, both Venus flytraps and North American pitcher plants are at their height, both physically and figuratively, but this won’t last long. The next open house on November 6 will be the last time in 2021 where either flytraps or Sarracenia pitcher plants will be available, as both (along with several species of sundew and triggerplant) slip into a very necessary winter dormancy in November. They’ll be back, but not until April, when they wake up, start growing new traps, and hopefully bloom.
As for the next open house, we’re trying several different options. Firstly, because the heat is no longer an issue, the next open house on November 6, 2021 starts at noon and runs until 5:00 pm, and this will be the default for the foreseeable future. Will this change? That depends upon other events, such as collaborations with other galleries, and will be advertised well in advance. What we can tell you for sure is that this should apply through the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas open houses starting in December, and we’re currently discussing having one last event on Friday, December 24 for everyone stuck until the last minute on gift options. Either way, keep checking back for more information.
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The penultimate weekend before Halloween, and we have plans, Specifically, this weekend’s Porch Sale (most likely held indoors just because of the unnaturally warm weather this weekend, just to make sure) is going to happen if it kills us, which it just might. (Unfortunately, because two of our best friends are getting married on Halloween weekend, don’t expect any Triffid Ranch events then, but we’ll have one last big event on November 6, and then we have to go quiet in order to get everything ready for the Nightmare Weekends Before Christmas events happening every Saturday starting December 4.) As always, admission is free, masks are mandatory, and I’m bringing doughnuts just in case Pete Freedman of Central Track comes out to visit. See you then.
Posted onOctober 21, 2021|Comments Off on Enclosures: “The Lungs of Hell” (2021)
Throughout most of known reality, evil is an abstract. It has no weight, no mass, no volume, and cannot be measured on a quantitative basis. One can feel overwhelming evil, but no scale exists in our realm to weigh it. The atmosphere of the moon is crushing by comparison.
This is true for our realm, but evil has a mass. If evil is best described as “the decay of virtue,” it flows like compost tea from a dead garden, like random fluids from an abandoned cemetery trickling into the groundwater, Eventually, it seeps and slides in the cracks between realities, lubricating the movement of the celestial spheres, and eventually dripping down…below.
Eventually, it collects far below. Below any concept of Hell, Mictlan, or other afterlife, enough to where it can be measured. Its miasma is an odor of which no human can conceive, its heft nothing a human could experience. Any being contacting compressed and supersaturated evil becomes a quantum event, simultaneously ceasing to exist in that second and undergoing a truly eternal torment. That being, no matter how perfect or divine, becomes part of the ocean, with absolutely no chance of rescue or escape. Sometimes, that metaphysical ocean of evil, stretching across and through dimensions, is reasonably quiescent, not advancing or retreating. Sometimes the ocean breaks down a barrier to previously untouched realities, causing it to flow away for a short time and revealing…things previously hidden. Every once in a great while, a being sufficiently hubristic to think themselves immune will splash upon contact, and the waves create nightmares for billions of souls. And like any other liquid, the sheer weight corrupts and corrodes and distorts anything underneath it, and any flow downward is mitigated by the constant fall of new evil, like a fog not quite ready to be rain, replacing and replenishing the supply.
While the unsophisticated talk about “Hell” as the ultimate holding site for evil, know that what philosophers and the sensitive assume is that ultimate holding site is only the literal tip of the iceberg. The true rulers of Hell, as far away from the demons of the higher planes as moles and worms are above eagles, are the beings that prevent it from sinking into the depths. The bottom of Hell is lined with sigils and glyphs of power from the rest of reality, all attempting to keep it afloat. Even more keep channeling the miasma to locations where it can be concentrated and processed. Bloodstones made of the corpses of whole universes work to draw in the mist, and other, barely conceivable constructs trap it, like lungs full of volcanic ash. Eventually the sheer volume of evil collapses in on itself, leaving gigantic russet crystals, beautiful in their unnatural sheen, gradually eroding out and falling to the sides. New constructs grow in the place of old ones, pushing aside older crystals like glaciers moving boulders.
Unbeknownst to the rest of reality, those crystals are a terrible, unstable power. Removed from the presence of the glyphs, they gradually fall apart, evaporating under the heady thin atmosphere of virtue. Most evaporate, but some crystals are so unstable that their dissolution is explosive. This property has no effect on ambitions and plans for revenge from the true rulers of Hell, and kept just at the edge of Evilflow is a tremendous cache of blades carefully knapped and shaped over the millennia, awaiting an equally forged and formed army to take them up. These blades will not last long in the upper realms, but the plan is that they will last just long enough.
Dimensions (width/height/depth): 18″ x 24″ x 18″ (45.72 cm x 60.96 cm x 45.72 cm)
Plant:Nepenthes bicalcarata
Construction: Glass enclosure. polystyrene foam, vacuum-formed plastic, found items.
Posted onOctober 21, 2021|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Armadillocon 2021 – 2
One of the biggest surprises about the dealer’s room at Armadillocon 2021 is how much things have changed since my last visit in 2000. For the longest time, the main dealer emphasis at litcons (conventions where the main emphasis was on printed fiction and nonfiction instead of other media) was on books and periodicals: back in 2000, convention dealers were the main access to rare or obscure books and almost the only way to learn more about up-and-coming magazines. Obviously, a lot has changed in the intervening two decades: book purchasing is a matter of a quick Amazon search, and the crash of both traditional magazine and zine distribution in the early Aughts is why so many new short fiction outlets are online-only, with the occasional hard-copy Kickstarter so the publisher isn’t stuck with cases of unsold copies. Both of these developments mean that the current dealer pivot is toward art, reference materials, and inspirations, and carnivorous plants seem to be quite the inspiration.
As to what the future holds, that’s a really good question. On an immediate level, everything with Armadillocon’s schedule depends upon availability of Austin hotels, which are apparently packed every weekend with football-obsessed alumni this time of the year. The general response to the Triffid Ranch table was overwhelmingly positive, but the biggest issue involves getting down to Austin in the first place: if subsequent shows are held in October, this isn’t a problem, but if the 2022 convention runs at the end of August, unfortunately the heat risk to the plants is far too high, We’ll figure it out.
In any case, many thanks are owed to the folks who came out to Armadillocon this time around, particularly longtime online cohorts who finally had the chance to make in-person acquaintanceships. Special thanks to Lillian Butler for making the dealer’s room situation happen, and now it’s just a matter of waiting for a final 2022 schedule. As far as other litcons are concerned, the schedule for 2022 in-person and virtual lectures and presentations is currently open, and for those who couldn’t make it this time, make plans for the Blood Over Texas Horror For the Holidays show at Palmer Event Center in downtown Austin on Thanksgiving weekend. And so it goes.
Fin.
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