So that’s it. 15 years of shows, 7 1/2 years of gallery events, and it’s all wrapped up, other than the remaining pieces. I’d like to thank everyone who came out to the gallery and the Porch Sales over the better part of a decade, the people who had to crawl over the entourage up front to get to the plants, the folks who came by shows all over Texas, and everyone who just came by because they wanted to know more about carnivorous plants. You were and are appreciated and remembered, and I’ll see you when I see you.
As for blatant and shameless plugs, it’s also time to note that for those who only now came across the gallery and want to know more about carnivorous plants, the book The Savage Garden by Peter D’Amato is still essential reading, and both the original and revised editions will remain beloved and valued components of my library. I may be getting out of carnivorous plant sales, but those books give a lot of inspiration for a new project to be announced later.
As mentioned before, this is the first time I have shut down a business, and it’s going remarkably well. No investors means no phone calls, no debt means no phone calls, and now I can be very vocal as to exactly why I’m not switching the gallery wifi service to Spectrum. (I have to admit that I’ll miss Spectrum for one reason: the incessant mailings are all on a very stout plastic card stock, which both paints up well and works nicely for paneling and armor in enclosures. Fir the first time, those cards see use other than as lining recycling bins.) The only calls right now are for the last vestiges of plants and fixtures, and all of that should end by the weekend.
The only issue so far with the move is discovering how many items purchased for the gallery are duplicated at home. Glasses, refrigerators, microwaves, spare towels…a lot of the items that could have been salvaged from the gallery’s closing are ones I had to purchase in the last year. Well, the local thrift stores, and friends who frequent them, are going to be happy.
To date, I have never run a business before the Triffid Ranch started back in 2008, and this is the first time I’ve had to shut one down. For the record, there’s nothing wrong with shutting down a business when conditions make keeping it open impossible: far too many businesses drag on when the person or people in charge attach too much of their identity to its continued operation. If it’s at all possible, it’s much better to shut down at a good time, rather than when forced to do so, and this couldn’t have been a better time. The weather was wonderful, the parking not too crowded out by the obnoxious neighbors at the end of the block, and the event itself wasn’t opposite some major Dallas event. Just imagine the fun of trying to do all of this in the middle of July in Dallas.
As mentioned before, there’s still a little left (and currently available for purchase), but the best liquidation sales are the ones where everyone goes home happy. Yes, it’s a bit sad watching the last bit of 15 years of work go out the door, but that just frees things for the next project, and you’re going to love it when it gets announced.
6 years after moving to the current location, and now it’s time to leave. Aside from the fixtures and a few remaining plants (and everything remaining is for sale), the Texas Triffid Ranch has finished its run. Considering the general life expectancy of art galleries in Dallas, it was an extraordinary run, but all things end, and it’s time for Dallas’s pretty much only carnivorous plant gallery to close the door forever.
The good news with the last liquidation sale is that the Triffid Ranch will be missed by many, but I promise that their aim will improve. The weekend was a nearly-neverending parade of longtime regulars, old cohorts and friends from Texas Frightmare Weekend, and a lot of folks who had no idea the gallery existed a week earlier. (So much for all of the advertising efforts over the last three-quarters of a decade.) It was an absolute blast and something that I wish could have run for a lot longer, but time’s run out and it’s time to move on.
It’s almost done: the last-ever Triffid Ranch Liquidation Sale and Wake runs this weekend from noon until 6:00 pm on both Saturday and Sunday. If you’ve never been out, or if you haven’t been out in years, you’re cordially invited to come out; if you’re looking for Lundia shelving, tables, chairs, and workbenches, then do we have a deal for you. After that, all that’s left is the sweeping out, because the keys get handed over on February 28. See you on the flipside.
One of the things that will be missed the most about shutting down the gallery will be all of the interesting people who came by, including a fascinating cross-section of Dallas’s reporters and journalists. (To date, the only publication without at least some mention of the Triffid Ranch over the years is D magazine: since I neither went to SMU or assisted its efforts to find a cure for levamisole necrosis, have no connections to local real estate developers needing to flip their blue-sky projects to bigger suckers, nor promoted workfare for refugees from the long-dead Dallas weekly The Met, this wasn’t likely to happen, either. I’d have been worried if its advertisers and bulk recipients could read instead of just looking at the pictures when skimming each issue before tossing it in the recycling.) In particular, I have to thank Eva Raggio, Kendall Morgan, and Danny Gallagher of the Dallas Observer and Jackson King at Community Impact for their efforts in letting people know about the little places in the Dallas area, and Jackson’s plug for the gallery’s close is probably the best sendoff I could get. At ave vale, and I hope to remain friends with all of you long after the Triffid Ranch fades from memory.
As for the gallery itself, now we’re down to brass tacks. The Sarracenia Roulette game mentioned earlier keeps bringing in friendly troublemakers in love with their fascinating pendulous blooms due in April, and we’re now down to roughly half of the enclosures that were in place at the beginning of January. There’s still a lot that needs to go home, though, so the final liquidation sale and Irish wake on February 25 and 26 are where the rubber meets the road. (This is also a great time to buy up fixtures, so if you’re needing large quantities of Lundia shelving or particularly hirstute kitchen tables, everything has to go.) This includes the contents of the propagation area and tubs and tubs of dormant Sarracenia, so you might want to bring tubs and other containers to hold all of your prizes.
For everyone coming out on Saturday and Sunday, I look forward to seeing all of you. For everyone who has been here already and can’t make it, you will be missed. One more weekend, and it’s done.
To explain the whole concept of “Sarracenia Roulette,” it requires a bit of backstory. Most temperate carnivorous plants, which include Venus flytraps and North American pitcher plants, go dormant over the winter. In the Dallas area, they slow down and stop growing in mid-November as the days get shorter and the temperatures go down, usually going fully dormant by the end of December. If things get particularly cold, as they did last December, the tops of pitcher plant pitchers burn and brown, but the pitchers still photosynthesize if they’re still green. With flytraps, the longer summer traps die off and shrivel, but a rosette of shorter traps remain to catch every photon of light they can over the winter. As days grow longer in mid-March, the plants start waking up again: Sarracenia pitcher plants first throw off flowers and then pitchers, as their pollinators and their prey are often the same insects. With flytraps, they start stretching out new traps in the middle of March, and if they got enough light during the winter, they produce long straight flower scapes toward the middle to end of April, each topped with tiny translucent white flowers.
This need for dormancy is one of the reasons why the Triffid Ranch traditionally didn’t sell flytraps and Sarracenia until the beginning of April. While most customers paid attention to the need for dormancy, there were always the people who assume they can ignore the instructions, fight to keep their plants active all winter long, and then throw tantrums when their plants died. Well, that and both flytraps and Sarracenia look rather scraggly and decrepit before they reemerge in spring. Most years, it was easier to wait and show plants in their best spring finery.
Since the gallery is shutting down, though, this was a perfect time for carnivorous plant enthusiasts willing to take a risk. Last December’s week-long deep freeze both left all of the Sarracenia in deep dormancy and freeze-dried most of their diagnostic pitchers, leaving them extremely hard to identify in this state. Since winter is the perfect time to repot Sarracenia anyway, so as to minimize root disturbance, the idea is that for $25 a pot, visitors to the Triffid Ranch liquidation sales get plants that have already gone through the worst of winter weather, and are ready to be put into container gardens or large pots full of sphagnum peat.
With this backdrop, should you come by this coming weekend for the final liquidation sale on Saturday or Sunday, February 25 and 26, and note that the Sarracenia look a little worse for wear, rest assured that they aren’t dead. They really ARE pining for the fjords.
The last week was interesting. The propagation area in the back of the gallery came down last Thursday, and all of the pitcher plants held for future enclosures were cleaned up and put on racks for sale. The last of the sundews and butterworts went into jars and bottles, and the bladderwort propagation containers came out. Normally, you’d never see North American pitcher plants and Venus flytraps at a Triffid Ranch event until they started growing traps, usually in mid-April, but this last holiday season hit Dallas hard enough with freezing weather and sleet that they were in deep dormancy. Yes, they were scraggly and appeared half-dead, but that was half of the fun. That meant playing a game of Sarracenia roulette, where nobody knew exactly what they were getting until the plants come out of dormancy in spring, at very good prices for large rhizomes and colonies.
All said, the penultimate Texas Triffid Ranch show was the largest event ever held in the company’s history, and certainly the largest at the gallery. The place was packed with enclosures, individual containers, and free-range temperate carnivores, with a lot of new and longtime visitors coming by to take them home. It’s remarkably bittersweet, as I’m going to miss so many people when everything closes for good on February 28, but it’s shutting down at the right time for the right reasons.
Posted onFebruary 15, 2023|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Liquidation Sale and Superb Owl Party – 2
One of the stranger sensations involved with shutting down the gallery involves habits. After a year or so in a new location, there’s a routine: you turn so to get into the driveway, you avoid a particular parking spot when hauling items because a particular overhanging tree gets in the way, or you go to a particular place for the space heaters in case the weather gets particularly cold. Logically, you tell yourself “in two weeks, none of this information won’t matter, because you’ll be gone, never to return.” Emotionally, though, the brain still runs through those habits: the old Valley View space has been gone for six years, and it physically doesn’t exist any longer, but the habits of unlocking and opening the gate, turning on the lights, and getting to work still show up in dreams.
This time, it’s a bit stronger, partly because the Triffid Ranch has existed in one form or another for fifteen years as of this coming April. It’s the realization that ordering new glass jars is no longer a priority, or that the back yard won’t be covered with Sarracenia pools, or that the need for rainwater containment is drastically reduced. Oh, there’s going to be new projects and new plans, but the anxiety dreams of “Do I have enough containers for next week’s show?” won’t apply to carnivorous plants any longer.
To be continued…
Comments Off on The Aftermath: Liquidation Sale and Superb Owl Party – 2
Posted onFebruary 14, 2023|Comments Off on The Aftermath: Liquidation Sale and Superb Owl Party – 1
It’s getting closer, and a lot of back inventory, in the form of plants kept in propagation containers in preparation for 2023 shows that aren’t going to happen, came out for the Superb Owl’s approval. Apparently a lot of people came to see the Superb Owl in its native habitat, and most stayed to view carnivores, purchase enclosures, and ask about the future.
Very seriously, the first actual Triffid Ranch liquidation sale was an absolute blowout, with crowds normally seen at events such as Aquashella and Texas Frightmare Weekend. More than a few folks first came across the Triffid Ranch via these events, and were hoping that even as the gallery is closing, possibly the shows would continue. Sadly, that’s not the case, but the sentiment was greatly appreciated.
To be continued…
Comments Off on The Aftermath: Liquidation Sale and Superb Owl Party – 1
We’re getting down to titanium tacks: this weekend is the Texas Triffid Ranch Carnivorous Plant Liquidation Sale and Superb Owl Party, running both Saturday and Sunday, February 11 and 12, from noon until 6:00, pulling out lots and lots of plants from the reserves and some additional surprises. As always, the gallery is open by appointment if you can’t make it out this weekend for a particular enclosure, and the liquidation sale continues on February 18 to move dormant temperate carnivores such as North American pitcher plants and Venus flytraps. (The only reason why these aren’t available this weekend is available space, so please come out to clear out what’s already here.) Flytraps and Sarracenia are also available via appointment, sold ready to go into outdoor container gardens before they start blooming, so feel free to ask about availability. See you this weekend.
The breakdown of the gallery continues apace, including finding homes for remaining enclosures. (You know that big aquarium in the back gallery full of Brocchinia reducta? It definitely needs a home.) A lot of smaller plants, purchased and potted up when the plan was for expansion and not shutdown, also need homes, so it’s time to announce the first and last Texas Triffid Ranch Carnivorous Plant Liquidation Sale and Superb Owl Party, running from noon until 6:00 pm on both Saturday, February 11 AND Sunday, February 12. Admission is obviously free, and yes, you can touch its little beak. Feel free to spread the word, and the liquidation sales continue until everything’s gone or February 28, whichever comes first.
