[David]

Ok, here's my observations...

We are stil relatively new to the cultivation of Nepenthes in Malaysia. The interest only started about 10 years ago, at least thats when we started to hear about Nepenthes and CP enthusists in Malaysia. This is because information about them and culitvated plants were not available. You cannot find any reading material on neps in bookshops.

Neps were also considered by many as roadside weeds and there is this misconception that these are jungle plants. If you try to cultivate them at home they will surely die. Another famous misconception is that Nepenthes only grows in the highlands where it is cold. Hope you can see how misinformed we are or perhaps how uninformed we are.

Credit must go to 3 sources, ie. Charles Clarke, Ch'ien Lee and Malesiana Tropicals for starting the ball rolling in Malaysia. A lot of us come to know about Nepenthes through Charles Clarke's Books. Ch'ien's work in MT at that time also gave publicity to the hobby. When it all started MT was the only source of tissue culture Neps and cultivation information for many of us. Of course later PetPicther came into the picture with the aim of providing information and a place for enthusists to meet and discuss about their plants.

We cannot ignore the fact that there are aslo alot of enthusiasts who have been growing these plants for a much longer time in Malaysia. However, some of them have a mentality like that of orchid growers in Malaysia, who are very secreative about their cultivation information. Perhaps they fear others would grow better plants than them. They will not share information but may check out the forum to get wahtever information they want. It is like the Chinese saying... "kiki ku kiki" which means (direct traslation)... "ownself take care of ownself". There is also the mentality of "what-can-I-get-out-of-it". Whay should I share my hard earn inforamtion and efforts? There are also some who feel that a Malaysian forum is not worth their time as the discussion here is not as educational or shallow as compared to discussions in overseas forum. If everybody thinks like this, we will never progress.

There is also another group of these veterans in Nep cultivation who are not familier with the English language or unfamilier with the internet or forums. As such we do not read or hear from them on the forum. You can only talk to them in person, and I can tell you they do grow huge robust plants and there is no doubt about their knowledge and experiecne in growing Neps.

I think sometimes because we live where Nepenthes grow naturally, we feel we do not need to experiment much to get the plants growing well for us. This can be a good thing or bad. Bad in a way that (example) we will not check the humidity etc for the plant as they just thrive in our gardens. But for growers, lets say in USA, you guys got to monitor all these factors like heat, sunlight, humidity, etc. So you guys would have more knowledge on these things. However, I think this should not be an excuse for us and I hope we can all encourage enthusists to equip themselves with more knowledge and experience.

Don't talk about enthusiats from countries far and wide. Somehow, enthusiats from our neighbouring country such as Singapore, Thailand and Indonesia seem to be more advance in this hobby compared to us in Malaysia. I personally feel ashame because these plants grows in my "backyard".