Wilderness Interface Zone

During fall of 2008, I was perusing a field guide of medicinal plants when a picture caught my eye. It was a small yellow leaf, round and stalked, with hairs rising from the top. On each hair was a small drop of glue.

I had seen this picture before, but it had never interested me before as it did then. I also examined another picture. This one was of eight-inch cup-shaped leaves, green veined with red, and half-filled with water. The most fascinating characteristic of both of these plants was that they caught and digested insects.

Oddly, these plants were suddenly beautiful and fascinating to me. I studied them more, searching the Internet and a program called Encarta for information on how they work and how to grow them.

The scientific names of the plants I saw in the field guide are Sarracenia purpurea and Drosera rotundifolia, a pitcher plant and a sundew. They live in acidic wetlands that have few nutrients in the soil. To adapt to this, the plants changed to take advantage of the fast food flying around them. The people who lived in the places where the plants grew sometimes already knew that the plants were carnivorous, plants such as the dewy pine. The sundew was one of the plants that Darwin studied to see if it was carnivorous. He also studied many other plants to learn whether the native people were correct.

Many of the places where the plants used to be common in the wild have been destroyed by human development. Today, less then five percent of American pitcher plants remain in their natural habitat. The majority of carnivorous plants are now grown for marketing. Carnivorous plants are kept as ornamental “pets” for their strange shapes, flashy colors, pest-eating ability, and overall bizarreness that attracts humans as much as insects.

I began to beg for a carnivorous plant for my birthday and soon got a book called The Savage Garden, by Peter D’Amato, to find out how to grow them. The book was an explosion of color pictures and information on plants, each more bizarre and beautiful than the last. I read eagerly, devouring the words with fascination, and learned several things, such as how Venus flytraps work.

The leaves of the Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) consist of two clamshell halves. Three or four trigger hairs stick straight out from the inside of each half. The edges are lined with teeth to help trap prey. Glands on the inner base of the teeth produce nectar. When an insect comes to drink the nectar, it touches two trigger hairs to spring the trap. This triggers an electrical current that, in turn, causes the cells on the trap’s outer surface to suddenly double in length. The concave shape of the halves reverse, closing the trap most of the way. As the insect moves around, trying to escape, it triggers the trap more until it closes completely and seals. Information like this and more filled the book.    

After I was finished reading The Savage Garden, I looked at the section describing the author and found an address to his website, California Carnivores. It is basically a “Little Shop of Horrors” from which to buy carnivorous plants. Using some Christmas and birthday money, I bought a Venus flytrap, an American Pitcher Plant, and an African Cape Sundew. They arrived less than a week later, carefully packaged and in excellent condition, ready to be accepted into a new home.

They now sit on a table near my window, bright and hungry. The flytrap’s small stands of bright green traps spring up from the soil surface, surrounded by equally green moss and some sundew seedlings.

From my Sarracenia pot grow long, thin green pitchers a foot tall, lids stained red from sunlight. Also, two kinds of sundews and two kinds of bladderworts live in this pot. And from my sundew pot arise three-plant crowns spanning six inches across. In this pot lives a surprisingly large seedling of the same kind. Bright green moss completely covers the soil. I also now have a fourth plant that I recently bought, Nepenthes Venticosa. From a tall stem grow two-inch, bright green leaves with reddish tendrils extending from them that balloon into half-red, half-yellow pitchers with lids.

Altogether, I actually have eight kinds of plants. Two kinds of terrestrial bladderworts, a fork-leafed sundew and several cape sundews seedlings color one pot. A Venus flytrap, a Sarracenia, Nepenthes, and adult Drosera Capensis all have their own pots. Each one of them is my pride and joy and will never cease to hold my fascination.

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Val is Patricia’s twelve-year-old daughter.  She shares a house with her family, six cats, one dog, and eight kinds of carnivorous plants.  Her hobbies include reading, writing, weaving friendship bracelets, embroidery, crocheting, sculpting in clay, and feeding insects to her carnivorous plants.  One of her currents projects is growing a salt crystal.