Conservation through Cultivation

At PlantsThatEat we believe the best way to fight back against habitat destruction and poaching is to preserve species in laboratory settings while simultaneously working to ensure that these plants can be produced for other hobbyists to enjoy. This helps us create a separate genepool where a species that is endangered in the wild can become relatively common in cultivation. This has been done before successfully with Orchids, and likewise we hope to do the same with Nepenthes.  

One of our partner's facilities in Indonesia, where we helped established a clean room for Nepenthes tissue culture and successfully cloned N. Lowii

 

While a large part of our business is Nepenthes imports from established wholesalers like Borneo Exotics, a great deal of our income will continue to be reinvested to expand our existing laboratory and help our partners in other countries develop their own labs.

 

How it All Started

My involvement with carnivorous plants started when I was 7 years old. I started growing and selling on a smaller scale with species like drosera and lowland ampullaria hybrids. My collection has continued to grow since then!

I majored in Mechanical Engineering at Stanford, where I brought most of my Nepenthes collection along with me. Despite the disagreement from some students, I continued to buy more Nepenthes until my dorm room started to fill up with terrariums (luckily, the university let me use one of the greenhouses to place my more established highlanders). 

At one point a professor saw my collection and introduced me to the biology labs, where I was first exposed to tissue culture.

Throughout the years and thanks to the gratitude of several growers, I have had the opportunity to cross-pollinate and tissue culture many different new Nepenthes hybrids and even cross-pollinate some Nepenthes species that flowered. Additionally, we have worked with hobbyists around the world to cross-pollinate rare species such as N. Clipeata. Many of these Nepenthes you will soon see for sale here!