LYNDA HALLINAN:
bug-busting with carnivorous plants
My grandmother Patricia never had a bad word to say about anyone. “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” she’d declare, though anyone who has ever found a rotten banana at the bottom of a fruit bowl knows this to be blatantly untrue, for acetic acid is to blowflies what nectar is to honey bees.
To be fair, Grandma Pat’s kindness didn’t extend to the actual flies in her often-quoted proverb. A farmer’s wife, she was as handy as anyone with an aerosol can, because blowflies and country life are incompatible in late summer. Not only are flies the bane of sheep’s backsides, they make a beeline for the preserving pot when I’m churning out litres of plum chutney.
It doesn’t help that my tiny kitchen, situated on the opposite side of our house to the prevailing sou’wester, turns into a blowfly bordello whenever anyone dares open a window in summer. In they fly, seeking shelter and sustenance, and it’s a devil of a job to entice them back out again.
But as I grow older, I’m getting softer. I don’t like to kill anything, with the exception of weeds and rats. In my spray-free garden, I let birds and beneficial insects tackle the bad bugs, while my eldest son Lucas’s carnivorous plant collection is now doing a sterling job indoors.
Lucas has been fascinated with carnivorous plants since he was a chubby-fingered toddler with a predilection for prodding Venus fly-traps. Now that he’s eight, he knows not to tease them, and instead spends hours hunting prey for his pet plants, armed only with a pair of tweezers and the Zen-like patience of Mr Miyagi. This process can get quite tense at times. While Prince Charles famously talks to his plants, Lucas and I prefer to hurl abuse at ours. “Shut your trap,” we bark at Dionaea muscipula, aka the Venus fly-trap, as we tickle its trigger hairs with a still-wriggling snack.
Last month, Lucas had a brainwave: “If the mountain won’t come to Muhammad,” he said, “then Muhammad must go to the mountain.”
I’m paraphrasing of course. What he actually said was,
“Why don’t we put all their pots by the compost bucket on the kitchen bench and let their food come to them?”
(There are no flies on his logic, even if he clearly considers my kitchen to be a bug-infested health hazard!)
There are 16 clans of carnivorous plants found globally but only two are native to New Zealand: sticky fingered sundews and swamp dwelling bladderworts.
While Venus fly-traps have famously hinged jaws, other carnivorous species have syrupy hairs that ensnare, resinous flypaper leaves or sugary swimming pools in which to drown their prey. Venus fly-traps and tropical nepenthes, with their large and anatomically confronting appendages, are easily obtained from garden centres, but deep-throated North
American sarracenias, also known as trumpet pitchers, are much harder to come by. These cunning carnivores have long necks that double as no-exit slip ‘n’ slides for unsuspecting insects.
I hadn’t seen sarracenias for sale in years until a chance encounter with Geraldine carnivorous plant collector Ross Taylor at the Timaru Festival of Roses last spring. Ross posts plants all over New Zealand (email him at ross. taylor@xtra.co.nz) so I promptly ordered half a dozen plants as a Christmas present for Lucas. They arrived in a tall box, their roots tucked into pots of sphagnum moss with a few freeloading sundews flourishing underfoot.
Given their insatiable appetites, I thought it quite clever to pot up Lucas’s carnivorous plants, along with my own asparagus ferns and baby begonias, in vintage kitchenware containers. Op-shop colanders and antique flour sifters
(do any home bakers actually sift flour these days?) already have in-built drainage, whereas metal loaf tins require a few holes to be drilled in their bases.
As Lucas’s plant collection has grown, however, our kitchen has started to look like the set of Little Shop of Horrors under the watchful gaze of Whaea Frida, a hand-painted wall plate by Tairua artist Vivienne Cory-Wright that pays homage to the Mexican painter and feminist icon, reimagining her as a mana wa¯hine with mako taringa (shark tooth ear pendant) and heru (comb).
Frida hasn’t raised an eyebrow, but a houseful of natural born killers is enough to make anyone feel slightly nervous, so I’ve decided they can see out the summer in our bathroom instead. Not only is it more convenient for dunking and draining the pots when the sphagnum moss dries out, if I open all the windows, shut the door and leave the light on, these carnivorous beasts can nocturnally feast while we all sleep easy.