Savage beauty inside a greenhouse

The last feeding had been a week ago, and the beasts were hungry. Joyce Latino wasted no time.

The last feeding had been a week ago, and the beasts were hungry. Joyce Latino wasted no time. She made a beeline for them, sang out, “It’s lunchtime!” and lovingly hand-fed her charges their feast: a single, squirming mealworm. In silence, the carnivores went to work. The Venus flytrap snapped shut, victim entombed. The graceful pitcher plant nudged its prey into an enzymatic pool of death. The forked sundew leisurely coiled hairs around its kill writhing in sap.

This summer, the normally serene greenhouse of the Volunteer Park Conservatory is the scene of live, meat-killing action as Latino and other gardeners feed the carnivorous plants once a week. It’s part of an experiment: do plants that receive regular feedings grow more traps than plants that kill bugs on their own? The gardeners say the experiment is a fun way to teach people about “carnies”, plants that became meat-eaters long ago to overcome the lack of nutrients in their native bogs.

Their advice: don’t fertilise them. Don’t tease the jaws of a flytrap; each jaw can only close a few times before dying. And don’t feed a carnie hamburger meat “unless you want to kill it”, gardener Nile Kurashige said.

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Carnivores vary greatly, from the compact flytrap with its spiny, jaw-like leaves, to the Nepenthes pitcher plant, a vine with quart-sized, gaping-maw tubes native to humid jungles. To be considered a carnivore, plants must be able to attract, trap and digest animals. Common meals include gnats, flies, hornets, ladybugs and larvae, but the plants have been known to eat worms and even small lizards, birds and mice. Experts are quick to say the mammals were probably sick or injured and couldn’t escape.

“I’m so in love with these things, I dream about them,” said Jerry Addington, a horticulturist who specialises in the plants at his Courting Frogs Nursery in Stanwood. Considered a guru on the subject, he appeared for a talk at a recent feeding at the conservatory, where he had brought his own fatal beauties: squat, sticky sundews and luscious Sarracenias—ruffled pitcher plants—in maroon and dappled green.

He loves how the plants emit an irresistible fragrance or nectar to lure victims, and quickly turn savage. The most popular of the killers, the Venus flytrap, he considers a one-trick pony. But the Sarracenias he adores, including the cobra lily, with its translucent, speckled leaves that curl into a snake-like hood, confusing insects trying to escape.

“They’re beautiful and intelligent,” he said. “They have the whole relationship upside down—here’s a plant that eats the bugs, instead of being eaten. How can one not be enchanted by them?”
-VANESSA HO (New York Times)