Where Vegetarianism Is Turned on Its Ear
Forestville, CA--There really is a plant that sucks in its prey,
including fish, and another that has been known to eat rats.
These plants are cultivated not only because of their strangeness
but because of their beauty.
Many people have seen the Venus' flytrap, known to botanists
as Dionaea, after the Roman goddess Diana, a beauty as well as a
killer. But other, less familiar carnivorous plants are even better
looking.
Peter D'Amato, a cheerful man of 39, has a great many such
plants here in his retail nursery, California Carnivores, about
60 miles north of San Francisco. There are more than 400 varieties
in his greenhouse, unusual both for the size of its carnivorous
stock and for Mr. D'Amato's policy of being open to the public every
day.
Well, he admitted, sometimes he takes a day off, but ordinarily
he is here from 10 A.M. to 4 P.M., ready to talk about his collection.
He began it at age 10 at his home in Tuckerton, NJ, after going to a
bog one day with friends to look for frogs. One of the boys picked
up a leaf from a plant at his feet. "I still remember vividly that
sparkling leaf, with insects stuck to it," Mr. D'Amato said.
It was a sundew, one of a group of plants botanically known
as Drosera that fascinated Charles Darwin, who published the first
book on carnivorous plants in 1875. THe sundew's leaves glitter with
a clear sticky secretion that attracts and captures insects. The
secretion comes from stalked glands that gradually close over the
prey; in some varieties, the whole leaf bends over. Other glands
in the leaf digest the victim.
Botanists say that carnivores' extraordinary diet is an
adaptation to growing in soils deficient in nutritive material,
especially nitrogen, which they can obtain from animal prey.
Mr. D'Amato was hooked, and he began collecting. But he
did not take up botany or horticulture academically or professionally.
After college, where he studied creative writing, he worked at
various jobs, including as a style engineer for Levi Strauss &
Company in San Francisco.
Then one day in 1989, he was showing his collection of plants
at a San Francisco garden show. Marilee Maertz, a longtime friend
and now his partner in the nursery, saw that his display was swamped
by people. "They were trying to buy it out from under him," she said.
"So I said to him, 'Let's do it.'" She and Mr. D'Amato opened the
nursery in 1990.
She might seem an unlikely partner. She had been head of
quality control for Navy contracts at Southwest Marine, a San
Francisco manufacturer of ship parts. But, she said, her mechanical
skills (she is a pipe-fitter) and her ability to handle paperwork
("a breeze after dealing with the Navy") are just what she needs at
the nursery. "Peter's the grower," she said. "I've never grown
anything."
He, on the other hand, has tackled problems like raising
Nepenthes rajah, a tropical pitcher plant that has bottlelike
appendages hanging from the ends of its leaves. N. rajah's
pitchers grow so big, 14 inches long with a mouth as wide as seven
inches, that they have been found to contain young rats, drowned
in the liquid secreted at the bottom of the pitcher and ready to be
digested.
N. Rajah is very rare, native to the tropical highlands of
Borneo. Mr. D'Amato has a medium-size one and some seedlings,
laboratory-grown in Germany. He doesn't list it for sale, although
he did sell a couple of the starts to collectors for $150 apiece.
Generally, the Nepenthes need greenhouse care, but a few,
Mr. D'Amato said, have been grown successfully indoors in frost-free
climates like Southern California's, and one can survive at 28
degrees Fahrenheit.
The Nepenthes, some of which are much easier to grow than
N. rajah, were hugely popular among well-to-do gardeners in Victorian
England, Mr. D'Amato said, and many hybrids were produced. He sells
a beauty of that period, called N. x mixta, and modern hybrids as
well. Most of the pitchers are very colorful, in reds, pinks,
browns, yellows, and greens, hanging from vines that can scramble
over a big trellis.
Confusingly, several other quite different carnivores are also
called pitcher plants. One is the American pitcher, Sarracenia. Unlike
the Nepenthes, it has tall, thin cones for pitchers. The nectar on them
is a botanical Mickey Finn, so the insects fall into the cone and are
digested.
Mr. D'Amato sells several varieties of carnivorous plants,
including Sarracenia purpurea, which is short, stocky and an
astonishing reddish purple. He said it will eat earwigs, snails and
slugs and is sometimes put into gardens at night for that purpose.
Mr. D'Amato said that the fish-eating plant Utricularia
humboldtii, of the group known as the bladderworts, grows well on a
windowsill. It's aquatic, of course, so it needs a large bowl of water
or small aquarium in which it will float.
Luckily for swimmers, the leaves of this larges of the bladderworts
have bladders only a quarter of an inch in diameter. They expel water
from within, setting up the suction that occurs when their doors open to
a touch of their sensitive hairs.
The opening and closing occurs very rapidly, taking from 1/500th
to 1/1000th of a second, and tiny fish are caught by the tail when they
trip the doors. The bladder digests the part of the fish that's inside
and periodically sucks in more. Mr. D'Amato recommended feeding them
Daphnia, or water fleas, usually available from tropical fish supply
houses. Better not let your fish spawn in that tank.
California Carnivores is at 7020 Trenton-Healdsburg Road,
Forestville, CA 95436; (707) 838-1630. Its "Growing Guide" with
catalogue is $2. Mr. D'Amato said that two Eastern nurseries with
substantial lists of carnivorous plants are Orgel's Orchids, 18950
SW 136th Street, Box K-6, Miami, FL 33187, and Marie's Orchids,
6400 Cedarbrook Drive, Pinellas Park, FL 34666.
Collectors also trade among themselves and exchange tips
on sources. Their organizaton is the International Carnivorous
Plant Society, c/o Fullerton Arboretum, California State University,
Fullerton, CA 92634. It publishes a quarterly journal, which is
$15 a year.
<typist's note: Three photographs accompanied the article, one of
N. x Dyeriana, one of N. Bicalcarata, and one of generic Sarraceniae>