Florist’s Plants Are Lovely and Oh So Hungry

The questions come with the territory.

“Please, sir, can they hurt my kitten?”

“Should I feed them hamburger?”

“Do they really eat meat?”

Carlos Campos Fuentes fields dozens of questions like these every week. He is the proprietor and sole employee of The Carnivorous Collection--a small shop that specializes in carnivorous plants.

Of course, there’s nothing like the voracious vegetables that nearly devoured Seymour, hero of “Little Shop of Horrors,” the musical play and movie based on Roger Corman’s 1950s horror film.

But people “still are influenced by old legends about huge, man-eating plants,” Campos Fuentes said. “The same legends the Spanish conquistadors brought here in the 16th century make people come to my shop with a mixture of fear and fascination.”

When a friend brought him the first specimens of Venus flytrap from California, he was immediately intrigued, Campos Fuentes said. He’d always been a plant lover, but these were different from any he had seen.

First he began cultivating them for himself, then he opened the shop, where he sells them for the equivalent of $20 to $30 each. As far as he knows, nobody else in Argentina cultivates or sells them.

This is only a hobby for Campos Fuentes, whose real business is selling conventional plants.

The Venus flytrap, or dionaea muscipula, is the best known of the carnivores. Two flaps lie open in wait for insects, which are attracted by a sweet nectar. When a bug brushes any one of three sensitive hairs, the flaps shut. By the time they open about 10 days later, the insect has been digested.

The pitcher plant (sarracena purpurea) looks like a half-filled balloon. It also attracts insects with a sweet nectar, but down into a pitcher filled with a digestive fluid from which there is no escape.

Students buy the shop’s plants for biology classes, Campos Fuentes said. Parents buy them because they’re better than a pet if a family lives in a small apartment.

Most people who pass the shop stop and look. A few ask questions.

Marta, a housewife, said she’d never buy one. “What if it bites me when I try to feed it?” she said.

You don’t have to feed them, Campos Fuentes said. All you have to do is water them. Like other plants, they make their own nutrients and don’t need to eat.

“The insects are just an added treat,” he said.