These plants all have one thing in common: An appetite for blood
Somewhere along the evolutionary timeline of bogdwelling angiosperms, the plants gathered together and decided they wouldn't take it any longer.
No more would insects see plants as the ultimate salad bar. The time had come to fight back. The time had come for the plants to start eating the bugs.
All right, it may not have been that cinematic. Our favorite plant carnivores turned to meat because their chosen evolutionary niche – soggy and acidic peatlands, for the most part – didn't provide enough soil nutrients. And although this may be a more prosaic reading of their botanical origins, the way veggie carnivores have engineered themselves to consume animals is genuinely wondrous and amazes each generation that grows up to discover this phenomenon.
Michael Szesze was 10 in the early 1960s when he came across the bizarre Venus' flytrap, which appealed to young minds because it seemed to be a plant well on its way to becoming an animal. Not only did it digest insects, it clasped them like a bear catching salmon. It was animated.
"The concept of a plant that gets back at bugs got me interested," he says. Almost six decades on, Szesze (pronounced sez-ee) has turned a 25-acre former Christmas tree farm – tucked away in the Catoctin Mountain ridge of Maryland – into one of the richest nurseries for carnivorous plants in the country.
Back when he was a Cub Scout, the mail-order flytrap was most likely the wild species that grows in the bogs and pine barrens of the Carolinas. Grade-schoolers ordered Venus' flytraps from their favorite magazines, and the plants would arrive and soon die from abuse, neglect or too much love. Monsters can be sensitive.
Today, for a number of converging reasons – the age of social media, the popularity of ecological gardening and the breeding of variants – the interest in carnivorous plants has never been more intense or widespread.
Szesze, 65, fills about 50 orders a week, and the success of his nursery, he says, is testament that "it's not just geeks buying the plants."
He shows me the oddities growing in the benches of his 900-square-foot greenhouse. From one species of Venus' flytrap – there is only one species, Dionaea muscipula – breeders have gone to town, and Szesze's Carnivorous Plant Nursery sells more than 30 varieties. Their names suggest their attributes – Shark's Teeth, Red Piranha and Fang among them.
Virtually every aspect of the flytrap species has been altered by hybridizers. The hinged traps are bigger or smaller, they're redder or greener, the guard hairs are longer or miniaturized, and so on. These subtle differences captivate collectors. Among those with the largest traps – approaching the size of a half dollar – are King Henry and B-52.
The greenhouse benches are full of other jewels, including butterworts and sundews. Butterworts resemble fleshy leafed succulents, but when you study them you see tiny dewlike droplets on the leaves, which are the eating apparatus for their meal. In his home, Szesze keeps one near the banana bowl to take care of fruit flies.
Sundews are found around the world, and they come in different forms, but they are all distinguished by tiny hairs capped with a sticky secretion that ensnares the prey and then absorbs it. They are typically ground-hugging, such as the pinwheeled pink sundew, found in southeastern states. Species from the Southern Hemisphere can be conspicuously taller and branched, no doubt to catch flying food. In one section of the greenhouse, Szesze points out staghorn sundews from New Zealand, whose tentacles are borne on antenna-like stems.
The greenhouse is used for propagating plants and as a home for the tender carnivores that wouldn't survive a winter outside.
These include the tropical pitcher plants, many of them tree-dwelling vines, and with pitchers so large and sinisterlooking that they have enthralled Western botanists for centuries.
I am partial to hardy North American pitcher plants, if only because they are some of the prettiest perennials in the garden. They are conspicuous with alien-looking nodding flowers and hooded pitchers of exquisite form and patterning, rising to 36 inches or taller.
The pitcher plant's showy flowers are held aloft like balled flags, facing down from tall stems. They bloom before the pitchers fully emerge – it wouldn't do to eat your pollinators. Some flowers are acid green, some maroon and some a deep crimson.
They are all spectacular.