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Pinguicula moranensis is a rosette-forming butterwort that traps small insects on sticky leaves to supplement nutrients from poor soil. It is one of the most commonly grown Pinguicula, prized for its large, pink to violet flowers and ease as a container plant.
Pinguicula moranensis is a perennial rosette-forming insectivorous herb in the flowering plant family Lentibulariaceae. It is native to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Mexico. A species of butterwort, it forms summer rosettes of flat, succulent leaves up to 10 centimeters (4 in) long, which are covered in mucilaginous (sticky) glands that attract, trap, and digest arthropod prey. Nutrients derived from the prey are used to supplement the nutrient-poor substrate that the plant grows in. In the winter the plant forms a non-carnivorous rosette of small, fleshy leaves that conserves energy while food and moisture supplies are low. Single pink, purple, or violet flowers appear twice a year on upright stalks up to 25 centimeters (9.8 in) long.
Pinguicula moranensis is one of the most popular and commonly cultivated Pinguicula, in part due to its large size, large and pretty flowers, and the ease with which it can be grown as a container plant. Most growers use an open soil mix composed of some combination of washed sand, perlite, vermiculite, peat moss, gypsum and/or decomposed granite. Soil should be kept well drained, but watered regularly with distilled water in the summer and only very rarely once the plant enters its winter rosette. The species grows readily on well-lit windowsills, under fluorescent lights, or in warm to hot greenhouses.
Pinguicula moranensis is the most widely distributed member of the Section Orcheosanthus. It is also the most common and widely distributed Pinguicula species in Mexico, being found in all the major mountain ranges except Sierra Madre Occidental and Baja California. Locations are known from the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Guanajuato, Nuevo León, Campeche, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, Distrito Federal, Veracruz, México, Querétaro, San Luis Potosí, Morelos, Hidalgo, Guerrero, Zacatecas, Tlaxcala, Quintana Roo, and Michoacán and the Guatemalan departments of Huehuetenango, Quiché, San Marcos, Quetzaltenango, Totonicapán, Sololá, Chimaltenango, Baja Verapaz, Guatemala and El Progreso. Here it grows in mountainous regions between 800 and 3200 meters (2600–10500 ft) in altitude. Generally, the species tends to follow sedimentary outcrops of the Cretaceous period. P. moranensis var. neovolcanica, however, tends to grow on igneous rocks of the Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt.
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Pinguicula moranensis by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts and the care summary drawn from them are shared under the same licence.
The care summary was written by AI (Claude, Anthropic) from the sources on this page, with general growing knowledge where they are silent. Check before relying on it.
Life form, climate and native range: World Checklist of Vascular Plants, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (CC BY 3.0), reformatted; see Plants of the World Online.
