Basic care tips
Water: rainwater, distilled, or reverse-osmosis water
How to water: bottom/tray method (add water in the saucer of the pot rather than top-water)
Soil mixture: 100% live sphagnum moss, peat + quartz sand or peat + perlite
Feeding: not required
Grows best in: outdoors, in the shade, with roots constantly wet in, preferably, cold water
Dormancy: Cobra lilies do need a period of winter rest.
For general information common to most Carnivorous Plants, please first read the Carnivorous plants care guide (general information)
Darlingtonia plants are not for beginners. I have been restraining myself from getting one but also secretly really wanted one but was also super hard to find them, so there were multiple aspects to why i had not bought any Cobra Lillies despite the fact that I really wanted to own one of these beautiful plants.
But then one day i found them in the local garden center and I decided it was time.
The most important and common failure point among all that I read was that you must keep the roots of the plants always cold as in their natural habitat, these plants live along the river coast where cold water constantly runs through their roots and keeps them nice and cold. So I decided I would start by buying 3 plants, exactly the same size, all young plants without mature pitchers. I thought that, because there was likely no chance to keep them alive, at least I would experiment. So I placed all plants in pure 100% sphagnum live moss, but kept 2 in a big pot outside, and 1 indoors under artificial light. The plants outdoors, I placed in a shady place without direct sunlight and over the next month or so i observed that the plants outside were slowly starting to grow bigger pitcher,s while the one indoors was staying tiny and almost non-growing. It did not die, but also did not grow at all. So I decided to place that one together with the other 2 outside in the same pot and they looked ridiculous, same age of the plants but one of them looked like a baby shoot from the others.
Also i only make sure to keep them in the shade and to keep the pot in a dish with water constantly and when i water i do it from the top, to rinse the roots a bit, so to speak. So far, already one year, they are growing and are beautiful, have already big pitchers and if we don’t count the occasional snail that gets to them and chews off some of the pitchers, overall they are doing just great. I leave them outside year-round and they go dormant in the winter. For the Dutch climate, this seems to be just enough.
