Carnivorous plants are now more popular than ever
It’s not just collectors who are into them
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.
→ They turned to meat because their chosen evolutionary niche — soggy and acidic peatlands, for the most part — didn’t provide enough soil nutrients.
Back when Szesze 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 at Szesze’s Carnivorous Plant Nursery, and his success, he says, is testament that “it’s not just geeks buying the plants.”
Venus’ flytrap
There is only one species, Dionaea muscipula, but 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.
Butterworts
They 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
These plants 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.
Pitcher plant
These have enthralled Western botanists for centuries. a sinister-looking plant with 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.
If you don’t have a greenhouse, and most people don’t, there are three basic ways to grow most carnivorous plants.
Indoors
Some carnivorous plants simply are not suited to indoor environments, though a few tropicals will work as windowsill plants if, in winter, they can be kept humid and away from direct heating or cold drafts. However, a terrarium with its own supplemental lighting is a better environment. Temperate plants should be allowed to go into dormancy during the winter by reducing water, temperature and light levels.
Outdoors in containers
This is the easiest way to grow hardy bog plants, but make sure the pot is big enough. A container that is too small will stress plants in winter (from freezing) and in summer (from evaporation). Szesze suggests a pot at least 10 inches across, and, of course, it has to be of material that is freeze-proof.
Szesze makes small gardens for patios with a medley of plants in low, broad plastic containers. He drills quarter-inch drainage holes on the side of the pots, just one inch or so below the lip. This allows the soil to remain saturated without flooding the plant crowns.
In a bog or raised bed
Building a bog garden is no small feat. You have to bring in large quantities of sand and peat moss and devise a way to keep it moist; the installation costs can add up.
Instead, you may want to consider a raised bed. Szesze has built an elevated display garden at his nursery, a five-sided timber-framed bed measuring roughly eight feet wide and 10 feet long. It is well stocked with various pitcher plants, bog orchids, violets, gentians, sundews and flytraps. It took 12 wheelbarrow loads of soil.
Don’t treat your carnivorous plant just like just another garden perennial or houseplant. You’ll kill it if you do.
Plants will die in conventional garden or potting soil.
It’s too rich. Use a mix of one part sphagnum peat moss to one part sand. Living sphagnum moss — the generative material of a peat bog — can work as a mulch, much as it would in a natural bog.
You can’t use municipal water, which has too many minerals.
The choices are collected rainwater, distilled (not bottled) water or well water.
Don’t feed your plant with fertilizer, including organic fertilizer.
Plants do need an insect meal, but only occasionally, and when outdoors in the garden they probably can feed themselves. Growers of indoor plants can use freeze-dried insects from a pet shop or wingless fruit flies.
Don’t use raw meat or cheese, says Szesze, which will rot, kill leaves and compromise the whole plant.
Flytraps need to feel a struggling insect to fuse their leaves for the meal, he says.
Closing a trap takes an enormous amount of energy, and if all that work is not rewarded with an insect, the plant is weakened.
“The worst enemy of the Venus’ flytrap,” he says, “is a kid finger-poker.”
