Specimen highlight: veitchii 'Candy Striped' x 'Candy'

Sometimes a plant deserves some individual attention, I figure every now and then I will highlight a single plant in my collection and detail its story. Going to start out with a very special veitchii.

    

With veitchii, sometimes you have a pretty good idea of what you're going to get as the plant matures, sometimes you get a pleasant surprise, this specimen was definitely the latter. 

I had posted in a forum looking for potential trades for a few plants I was trying to get rid of at the time, mostly random hybrids that were quickly outgrowing my grow tent and frankly, weren't super interesting to me. This was shortly after I began getting really interested in veitchii and was actively seeking out new specimens to add to my collection, I was contacted by someone with a small veitchii with quite an interesting story. 

They told me that this plant was grown from seed purchased from an overseas vendor, who provided pictures taken from CP Photofinder as the supposed parents of the seed. As the price per pod was very cheap, they ordered it anyway, the seed arrived labeled as veitchii 'Candy Stripe' x 'Candy' and was obviously quite old. Out of 3 pods, this plant and one sibling sprouted, I believe the sibling plant died a few years back. At the time, the plant was maybe a few inches across and showed some faint striping, nothing to suggest it would be anything other than average. I decided to make the deal, mainly because the veitchii sickness had already begun. 

The plant was fairly nondescript for the first couple years I owned it, grew fairly quickly and began to show more color but was still outshadowed by the (m) and (k) specimens in the collection. I even debated on selling it several times. It wasn't until about mid-2018 that it began to really show its true colors!

The pitchers began to develop a really nice red coloration on the body coupled with a highly flared, highly striped peristome. Though the pitchers themselves aren't very squat, all the other traits more than make up for it.

I haven't had a respectable pitcher on this plant since the one in the first picture on this post, taken in June of 2020 but I did luckily get a flower from this plant (bloomed male) and was able to make 2 crosses, both with female veitchii (k) and should have seed ready to harvest in the near future. It has also pushed out 3 basals, so hopefully it'll be back to its old self soon!