N. robcantleyi: BE-3517 *Pre-Order*

Many years ago, we bred two of the only nine plants known in cultivation of this, one of the rarest of all Nepenthes. The area where the seed that gave rise to the original nine plants was collected was devastated by logging activities in the late 1990s, and Nepenthes robcantleyi is believed to be either critically endangered or possibly even extinct in the wild. The female parent of this release has the cultivar name ‘Queen of Hearts’ and is very probably the most photographed Nepenthes in history, having appeared on many of our gold medal-winning Chelsea Flower Show exhibits. The male parent named ‘King of Spades’ is darker in overall colouration than the ‘Queen of Hearts’ and has green peristome wings.

For some years, we labelled these plants as a form of N. truncata, although there were clearly striking taxonomical differences between them and the existing published description of N. truncata. In December 2011, N. robcantleyi was described in the Nordic Journal of Botany as a distinct species in its own right by Dr. Martin Cheek, a taxonomist with the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. The publication gives the history of this species in cultivation and the reason why the3848 name Nepenthes robcantleyi was chosen.

So far as we are aware, all of the 550 clones are remarkably true to form, and all exhibit the dark colouration that seems to be an invariable characteristic of the species. We have noticed only small variations in morphology, with some clones producing pitchers that are squatter than others.