Question
Hello Christopher Littrell

I had bought a cape sundew from my local nurserie about 2 months ago in late May and had first placed it on my window sill where it got about 14 hrs of sunlight a day and left it there for the next month or so ( I live in South Africa ).and then in June I had bought a see through plastic container and kept it in there for the next month so that it could get some humidity. But then the actual tendrills started to get shorter and the carnivorous part of the leaf started getting shorter and bent backwards as if doing a front flip and is allmost touching itself and had also lost Its redness. If you need any more information please send me an email so that I can find out what is happening.

Thank you Joel

Answer
Hello Joel,

Cape Sundews are native to the South Cape of Africa, so your conditions should be natural to the Sundew. Even if your home conditions are lower in humidity than the conditions on the South Cape of Africa, the Sundew you have can adapt to very low humidity very easily. Don't fix what is not broken.

Your easiest fix at this point is to simply take the Sundew out of the domw and clip off the entire plant down to the ground. Yes, I know that sounds mean, but that particular plant is a master of regeneration from its root system. The crown of the plant is dwindling and may never quite recover, so clipping the plant off does two things. One, it allows you to restart the plant from the ground up and to adapt to your home humidity naturally. Two, it also allows the Sundew to reproduce. It will send up one or more runners from its roots to grow several new baby Sundews around the adult crown that got cut off. Each of those baby Sundews will grow into an adult in a few months with no sign of the damage done in the humidity dome.

The humidity dome was causing several problems for your plant. It was generating too much humidity in a stagnant environment, keeping the plant from getting any insects on its own, and by the sound of it, most importantly, reducing the amount of light the plant was getting as it refracted through your window, then the dome.

I grow all my Cape Sundews open pot in barely 50 percent humidity under artificial light indoors with no problems. I had one, now I have dozens from root cuttings and simply clipping plants off at the ground level. They are almost impossible to kill as long as they have some kind of environment close to tolerable for their needs.

Christopher