Fake 194

A fake picked up in one of the cafés in the gardens at Wisley - with the last fake, as it happens, coming from a visit to Kew, a place we only rarely visit.

Fake in the sense that the tin had never been used to sell olives or olive oil. It had been manufactured as a bit of table décor for the better class of café. Quite possibly made in Warrington, that is to say up north, or somewhere like that.

While before making this post, I was having some trouble with a curious bottle shaped contraptions for catching insects, growing on stalks growing out of the tips of the long, narrow leaves - in the orchid house added to the side of the big greenhouse, just across the way from the café in question. A plant which, for some reason, I did not photograph with my telephone. Perhaps I thought that I had enough snaps already. Perhaps I had been put off by all the other people taking pictures with their telephones!

I start off by asking Bing, but he is fixated on bottles.

Google is not much better.

I then try for images. Still no good.

Time to ask Gemini, who quickly gets to the bottom of the problem: the plant is not an orchid at all, rather a pitcher plant. And he had not been bothered by my forgetting to say that we were in the orchid house.

However, he did spawn a new problem. What sort of pitcher plant was it, from the near 200 available according to reference 2.

More faffing about with Bing, Google and Gemini, with the problem here turning out to be that in the most likely, Nepenthes flava (flava being the Latin for the distinctive yellow that I remembered), the upper pitchers are yellow and plain, while the lower pitchers - this being a climbing plant - were much more complicated in both shape and colouring, and so of more interest to the people who put pictures on the Internet.

He also explains that the pitcher is not a flower, despite its sometimes elaborate appearance. Which would get over the difficulty of a flower bud appearing at the end of a leaf - something which reference 4 suggests should not happen. Leaf buds and flower buds are quite different and do not get mixed up in this sort of way.

Will have to go back to take another look. And maybe not to be so shy about taking a picture.

And maybe we will have an expedition to Hampshire for one of the open days they have a reference 3. Even busier than the orchid house at Wisley?

And while one might fault Gemini's style, he can cope with my queries and on this occasion we more or less got to the bottom of the matter. 

References

Reference 1: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2025/11/fake-193.html.

Reference 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepenthes.

Reference 3: https://www.hantsflytrap.com/.

Reference 4: Trees: Their natural history - Peter A. Thomas - 2014.

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