Healthy Appetites
Of all the plant world’s oddities--giants, stinkers, living rocks--none grabs the mind like a carnivore, a plant that dines on flesh, reducing hapless bugs to skeletons. While other greens gorge on sun and water, carnivores lie in wait, trapping prey on sticky leaves, which dissolve and devour them. Or they clap them up like clams. Or lure them into a slippery tube with a drowning pool at its bottom. Why the aggressive appetite?
They lack protein. In nature, these sundews, flytraps and pitcher plants often sprout in bogs that are weak in nitrogen and micronutrients. The animals they catch--small flies, wasps, midges and gnats--bridge that nutritional gap. There are even some plants with appetites and “mouths,” or pitchers, so big they can gobble mice.
If that turns our image of the gentle plant on its ear, well, life is strange. And what’s strange is interesting to brothers Noah and Peter Elhardt, two Thousand Oaks teens who collect bug-eating plants. “Many happen to be beautiful,” says Noah, 17, whose favorites include Drosera, or sundews, which are passive trappers that ooze a sparkling, gnat-catching goo. He also loves the go-getting Venus flytrap, which snaps up any bug that gets close enough to tickle the fringe on its touchy trap.
For Peter, 13, the most compelling carnivores are the pitchers, from the Sarracenia of Florida swamps to one tropical Nepenthes with a trap so huge, it’s used in Borneo for boiling rice.
Over the past two years, the boys have amassed at least 1,000 carnivores, encompassing 115 different species and 140 varieties. Many of these, in pots, terrariums and plastic takeout trays, have colonized the brothers’ room, seizing tables, jamming shelves, pushing their beds against the walls. The rest of the bunch live outside, in patio pots behind their house, in boxes tucked around the swimming pool or in a hilltop bog, which was where this business really took off. Their parents, Dieter, a clinical research manager for the biotechnology company Amgen, and Maria, a teacher who home-schools 4 of the 7 young Elhardts (ages 3 to 21), gave a starter kit to Peter as a Christmas gift. “We try to support the children’s interests and start new ones,” Maria says.
The current support system for the carnivores includes a stash of (dead) bugs in the family fridge and a microwave oven in the parental bathroom, where Noah does tissue-culturing, a method of propagating more plants that has won him two awards at California’s State Science Fair. He and Peter have been pushing for a greenhouse where they can grow even more plants--especially tropical varieties that need humidity.
The vast array of sizes, shapes and colors in the carnivorous plant clan was what hooked the boys after the weirdness factor wore off. Take the bladderwort in their bog, whose traps are “as small as a thought in a sentence,” Noah says. Or a Sarracenia’s upside-down umbrella bloom. Or the electric lime-green of a butterwort. Carnivorous plants grow almost everywhere on earth, including California. “There are whole meadows of Darlingtonia californica, our own cobra lily,” Peter reports. “We, sadly, have only one.”
“A dead one,” Noah adds, introducing an important point. Carnivorous plants aren’t necessarily a snap to grow, unless you live beside a bog. If you don’t, you must raise them in containers full of moist but fast-draining soil (half peat moss, half perlite, for example). Many like bright, but not blasting, sun; others, including Venus flytraps, Sarracenias and some sundews, need dormant winter time outside. “Learn where a plant’s from so you can mimic its native conditions,” Peter advises.
The Elhardts learned to raise their specimens from Peter D’Amato’s sourcebook, “The Savage Garden” (Ten Speed Press), and information-packed Web sites such as sarracenia.com and forums such as the one at petflytrap.com. They’ve also been active in the Los Angeles Carnivorous Plant Society, which meets quarterly, often at the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce, for lectures, plant sales and exchanges. But experience is a teacher too, and Noah now has a Web site (dionea.homestead.com), and he and his brother are designing a bog garden full of carnivores for the Conejo Valley Botanical Garden in Thousand Oaks, which they hope to have completed for public viewing by March 30.
Since the main cause of failure with their chosen plants is neglect, they water all of them daily in summer and mist those that thrive on humidity. The outdoor plants catch their own bugs, but the boys try to scrounge food weekly for the indoor types. “There are more bugs in your house than you think,” Noah says. And even plants that go without bugs won’t die; they’ll only grow more slowly.
As a starter plant, the Elhardts recommend cape sundew (Drosera capensis). Grow it inside or out under very bright light, keep the soil moist and it will spread like a weed. One of the hardest to grow is probably the most familiar, the Venus flytrap.
“Don’t poke it with your finger and don’t feed it hamburger,” Noah counsels in the weary, heard-it-all voice of the seasoned chat-room sage.
Peter adds, “When people ask, ‘Will it eat my sister?’ we have to say, ‘Not unless your sister is a fly.’ ”
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Resource Guide
Conejo Valley Botanic Garden, Thousand Oaks, (805) 494-7630.
