During the last year or so I have been rebuilding a collection of Sarracenias following an unfortunate fire in the greenhouse a few years ago that more or less wiped them out. As a consequence, many of the following plants are still young, newly acquired and often poorly coloured. As the years pass, the seedlings will mature and the pale will redden.

I have written a short note here about the issue of Sarracenia Names in cultivation.

And this is the Sarracenia Deconfusifier .

I have simplified these pages slightly in an attempt to make clearer sense of the variation that occurs. Each of the species shows significant variability, and all the species hybridise to produce fertile offspring. Some quite complex hybrids occur in the wild, and in cultivation there are large numbers of different hybrids in circulation.

There are eight generally accepted species of Sarracenia. There has been a long debate about the status of Sarracenia rubra ssp. alabamensis. Early opinion treated it is a species, Sarracenia alabamensis, but the taxonomic argument is rather slight, and a new name seems to have little utility.
Sarracenia purpurea ssp.venosa var.burkii is a distinctive variety of Sarracenia purpurea that occurs in a discrete southern population, and there are some significant arguments to support raising it to species status as Sarracenia rosea, however at present the arguments are insufficiently persuasive and once again, there seems little utility in change for its own sake. If you are prepared to suspend critical judgement, there are slight arguments in support of ten species, but they are sufficiently slight for me to waste no further time on them here!

There are a number of publications that deal with Sarracenias. My favourites at present are:
Donald E.Schnell, 'Carnivorous plants of the USA and Canada'. Second edition, 2002, Timber Press. The first edition was an old friend, and made a valliant attempt to put all of the available information into a single digestible volume. The second edition is a delight of digestible erudition, but would do substantially more damage if dropped on you from a tall building. (So take care, and don't say you weren't warned).
Sterwart McPherson, 'Pitcher Plants of the Americas',Macdonald and Woodward Publishing, 2007. A very recent addition, the intellectual equivalent of a kiss from a good looking stranger at a bus stop. Delightful, unexpected and lingering in the memory.

Sarracenia species