A fer years ago I went to a house meetup from the Carnivorous plants group in the Netherlands. Usually, these are open days where someone from the group hosts a little reception at their house where you can meet other enthusiasts. Sometimes it’s a bit more of a sale than a gathering but it’s always a great opportunity to buy some new cultivars of your favourite plants. At one of these houses, I saw a gorgeous terrarium with absolutely amazing rare plants from Borneo, a vertical terrarium from the floor to the ceilin,g and this lady told me she obtained the plant from Borneo and built a whole terrarium for it. I was absolutely stunned by that and ever since I saw it, i dreamed of having such an awesome little piece of jungle in my own house one day.
And be careful what you wish for, because it may become true 🙂 Right? A few years later I went to Indonesia with a friend and we were planning our trip when i realied that.. wait a second, Borneo IS Indonesia! (yes, bad geograpgy knowledge, i know..) So i proposed to her that we go to Borneo too, I really wanted to see the Nepenthes in their natural habitat and, perhaps, even buy a plant. So off we went, and both of us being plant nerds, she way more than me, but we match 😀 We went to a plant market and bought lots of plants. My Nepenthes ampullaria search was a bit lengthy as I wanted to make sure the plant is not poached and in the end I did find a person who grows them, probably the firts plant still poached, but at least mine wasn’t. I bought it and got a certificate and everything, for a fraction of the price i’d pay for a plant this size. When I returned home i was determined to keep the plant alive so i kept it in a plastic box for a while just so i can keep the humidity high until i bought my tank and planned the project. But the months were going on and I didn’t work on the project because I was afraid i knew nothing and felt like i needed endless research before i could do it. But then i started watching YouTube videos and decided I want to go for a paludarium – terrarium with water feature and a little water area, not very deep. And off I went to research what materials i’d need and how to build the tank. But then had to tailor this to carnivorous plants, which required more research and reading forums etc as the number of materials CPs can tolerate, is very low. Pretty much boils down to the usual suspects for soil – peat moss, perlite, quartz sand + lava stone. I bought a big bag lava stone gravel, bigger sized lava stones to decorate with, tree fern moss for the walls, aquarium-safe expanding foam and silicone to glue the fern slabs on the glass with, aquarium foam for the bottom layers and some tubing to builf pump-powered rain feature where the idea was to have a little rain thingy on top which will “rain”, or drip, once or twice a day and will water the plans this way, but sadly, that proved to be a bad idea because soon after that the tube holes got clogged and it stopped working. I placed the tubes and pumps on the right side and covered them with more foam and lava stones on top so that if i ever need to open and access them, it would be easy to do so. I placed the bottom layer of foam such that there would be 1cm left all sides to hide the foam by adding lava gravel. In the middle, I had a water pond with sand and lava stones and some water plants. The plants were growing like weeds and some were browning, so i decided to remote all plants, except for some aquarium grass. Also working on the waterfall feature proved to be not such an easy task, as I used expanding foam for it with some paper-drawn blueprints to give me an idea how big the feature should be, but the foam expanded waaay too much. However, while the foam is not completely firm, you can gently press and reduce the air inside of it and shrink it a bit, allowing for some better shaping. Gluing moss, tree fern slab shreddings and gravel on top of it, didn’t really work though – it was quite messy and hard to do, but in the end it was ok. Also, after I put some moss at the top, and put the plants, once they started growing, the moss covered a big part of the waterfall feature, and the plants hid the majority of the leftover exposed foam so it was ok.
If i had to re-do the project today, I’d definitely skip adding any utricularia plants inside – they grow like weeds and there is no getting rid of it, and I would skip the tube for the rainfall. I would also probably add an aeration thing to move the water because now it gets algae and stinks a little when the waterfall runs once a day. The water is black, which does not bother me per se, because in Borneo I swam in the black water of the river – that’s how the water looked like and was not stinky, it was quite clean, just with some sort of bacteria which apparently is very healthy and some aquarium stores even sell it because it is good if your ish lives in it, or something. (Don’t quote me on that, a friend told me). Well, check out the materials list, a few key points I had noted down before starting ,and please, do let me know if you have a paludarium yourself or any CP setup similar to this, super curious to see and learn from your experience. Do let me know what you think 🙂
