When I turned eleven years old, my grandfather gave me a venus flytrap and I think it would be an understatement to say that I was amazed. I believe my thought process was something along these lines:

Ah, hmm. A plant. Nice. What are these science-fiction looking leaves here? What’s that you say? It eats bugs? How? It’s leaves close up, trapping them, and then it digests them, just like that? Holy. F**king. Shit.

Yes, I was a potty-mouthed little bastard, but when I learned that fact it blew my little mind. Plants don’t move like that, I thought to myself, at least not without the help of a stiff breeze. Plants don’t eat living things, they eat dirt and sunbeams (I was a little fuzzy on the science back then). It was like finding out that once every year the sky would turn purple instead of blue, only for five minutes, on the second Tuesday of August, and everyone knew this and thought it was perfectly normal.

I watered my gift and fed it half-dead flies from the windowsill and gave it lots of sunlight and Miracle-Gro, but,  likely because of my over-enthusiasm, I killed the poor thing within a matter of weeks.  My amazement at the world of carnivorous flora, however, lived on.

I’m not alone in my fascination. It is a fact that Charles Darwin himself was so fascinated by carnivorous plants and the conditions that surrounded their evolution, that he spent 15 years of his life studying them and eventually wrote a book on the subject. And, of course, anyone who ever watched the movie or musical “Little Shop of Horrors”.

So, it was with great relish that several weeks ago I found myself on the doorstep of California Carnivores, the largest carnivorous plant nursery and store in the United States, owned and operated by carnivorous plants expert Peter D’Amato, author of The Savage Garden: Cultivating Carnivorous Plants. And you can imagine my surprise upon learning that this facility is located some four minutes down the road from my own home.

I arrived there in the early afternoon, under a blazing Northern California sun, and waited in the parking lot for my drummer (Bryce), his mother (Edie), and stepdad (Jim) to arrive. Jim had been getting a massage in Sebastopol, a pretty thorough one, we found out. They were late, but I’m above mentioning something like that.

“He was a great big guy, this masseur, and he told me the massage would take over an hour and he would work on every single muscle in my body.” Jim remarked. “I had no idea the penis was considered a muscle…”

I told him that, if I were to become a masseur, that I already had a name picked out. “I’ll call myself ‘Hans Roving’. You get it? ‘Hans Roving’!”

A rare miss for me. We’ll chalk it up to my slowly baking brain.

We walked through a sliding glass door into the greenhouse and were immediately awash in a wave of incredibly moist and dense air. Rows of tables stretched off into the far end of the building, each laden with dozens of plants in various stages of growth, a multitude of exotic species that would seem more at home in the background of a science-fiction film, perhaps on Betelgeuse. Truly immense examples of several species lined the far wall and along the wall behind us was an immense swamp-cooler made out of hundreds of thin ribbons of metal hanging from an irrigation system in front of fans. This wall, the coolest area in the greenhouse, would quickly become my best friend.

We were, after wandering around for a few minutes, taking pictures and ooh-ing and ahh-ing, approached by the owner, Peter D’Amato. He was, to make an understatement, immensely informative and gracious. He was also exactly as geeky (and I do mean that as a compliment) as you’d imagine one of the world’s foremost authorities on carnivorous plants to be.

You might be asking yourself, as I was when I walked into California Carnivores, why such a thing as a carnivorous plant even exists on out planet, and the answer to that question is evolution, my dear Watson. Plants need several things to survive: sunlight, water, and various nutrients and minerals provided, usually, by soil. In certain areas of the world, though, the soil may be sandy and devoid of essential nutrients and minerals. Do plants give up and just not grow there? No, they do not, they persevere. They adapt, over many eons, their own structures to be able to catch and eat various bugs and small animals to get the nutrients they need (this is why feeding my first venus flytrap Miracle-Gro was a horrible idea). And that, in a nutshell, is how they came to be.

It is not dissimilar, I noticed, to how the red deer of the Isle of Mann evolved to eat the legs and heads off of baby birds, puffins specifically, to supplement the lack of minerals in the local vegetation. The deer only consume the baby bird’s leg bones and skulls during mating season, and only because the minerals enable the red deer to grow the antlers that are needed during the mating season. Since learning this little tidbit of information almost a decade ago, I try to share it several times a year, not just because it’s a fascinating little oddity of nature, but also because it gives me the willies and I’m hoping to pass them on. I mean, they’re carnivorous deer, for heaven’s sake. I’ll bet they growl.

Anyway, we perused the nursery and explored the outside growing area where there were several dozen large-sized kiddy pools filled with with small jungles of plants, while all the while Mr. D’Amato answered question that I don’t think any had ever had the cajones to ask him before. Questions like: Are there any cases of plants that could ensnare and digest a human being? Do you have any plants here that shoots poisonous projectiles? Could a venus flytrap ever grow big enough to eat, say, a puppy? Do you remember the character ‘Poison Ivy’ from the Batman comics?

The answer to all of these question were, sadly, no. And if he was annoyed at all, he hid it quite well.

“Is it normally this empty in here?” I asked because I have no tact.

“Well, it’s much busier in the morning. This morning it was pretty busy, but most people don’t like to come in when it’s this hot. It’s, like, 105 degrees out right now, and several degrees hotter in here.” He said. “We keep it like this because it’s the environment the plants thrive in.”

“I’d imagine. It feels quite tropical in here.” I said, to which Mr. D’Amato replied that it is actually a common misconception that carnivorous plants grow primarily in tropical jungles. Carnivorous plants grow pretty much wherever there is soil will low mineral content and a fair amount of sun.

While browsing around I became quite enamored with a plant called the cape sundew (Drosera Capensis). A mesmerizing plant, the cape sundew, like all sundews, draws insects in with it’s sickly sweet smell. The hapless insect becomes caught in the hairs that line the sundew’s leaves and fluid quickly fills the insect’s breathing holes. Digestive fluids then dissolve the insect’s innards which are then absorbed and give the plant the minerals it needs to survive.

But the real stars of the show are, undoubtedly, the pitcher plants. When a fly lands on the pitcher plant’s leaves, Mr. D’Amato told us, it becomes intoxicated due to a natural secretion. The fly gets thirsty and goes down into the funnel of the pitcher plants and a combination of the narrow funnel shape and the multitude of downward-pointing hairs drives the fly down into the plant where it becomes stuck in the a small pool of water and enzymes, where the insect is digested.

When the flies land on the leaves and they get drunk, they become quite docile, he continued, and you can pet them.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “what was that?”

“You can pet them,” he said again. He then reached out towards one of the flies to pet it with the tip of his finger but it flew quickly away before he got to it. ”Hmm. Not drunk enough yet.”

I cannot stress enough how much I enjoyed talking to Mr. D’Amato.

After two hours I decided I’d had enough punishment from the sun. On my way out I considered buying a plant but then remembered my venus flytrap from 16 years earlier. After all I’d learned about plants that day, I had a newfound respect for them. It was an ethical quandry: Do I buy myself a plant knowing that I might very well kill the poor thing, a plant that might thrive somewhere else, under the care of an owner with common sense?

It was quite a pickle which was resolved for me by Bryce’s mother, Edie, who presented me with one of her own venus flytraps that she’d bought earlier, to take home with me as a gift.

Also, having known me for many years, she made sure I didn’t leave without a “How To Care For Your Carnivorous Plant” pamphlet tucked in my pocket.

Tags: California Carnivores, carnivorous plants, Isle of Mann, man-eating plants, Peter D'Amato, pitcher plants, sarracenia, venus flytraps

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 14th, 2009 at 11:52 pm and is filed under Educational, Life, Quite Interesting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.