A nursery for plants that eat. We grow only the red forms — flytraps, sundews and pitchers stained deep with anthocyanin — under glass in a Bermondsey railway arch, and open the doors after dark.
Dionaea muscipula ‘Akai Ryu’
0/2
Touch a trigger hair on the trap. Then touch one again.
One touch could be a raindrop. Two in quick succession is probably something alive. The flytrap counts: a first touch on a trigger hair is remembered for about twenty seconds, a second one within that window springs the trap. After the snap every struggle is another signal — the trap seals itself, floods with enzymes and begins to dissolve its catch.
Five mechanisms · one glasshouse
01 — Dionaea muscipula
Two lobes on a hinge, three trigger hairs on each. Touch two hairs within about twenty seconds and the lobes snap-buckle shut; the marginal cilia interlock into a cage.
0.1 s to close · wild only within ~120 km of Wilmington, North Carolina
02 — Drosera
Every tentacle ends in a gland wrapped in a drop of mucilage that glitters like dew. An insect sticks; the tentacles around it bend inward over minutes to hours, and the leaf may curl around the meal.
minutes–hours · sundews grow on every continent but Antarctica
03 — Sarracenia · Nepenthes
A tube that smells of nectar. The rim is slick when wet, the walls are waxy or lined with downward-pointing hairs, and the bottom holds a pool of digestive fluid. Nothing climbs out.
no moving parts · the Nepenthes rim aquaplanes insects when wet
04 — Darlingtonia californica
The cobra lily’s hood is pocked with translucent patches that look like a way out. Insects fly at the false windows, tire, and drop down a tube lined with downward-pointing hairs.
false windows · cold seeps of northern California and Oregon
05 — Utricularia
Underwater bladders pump themselves partly empty and wait with the door shut. When prey brushes the trigger hairs the door buckles inward and water rushes in, carrying the prey with it.
< 1 ms · among the fastest movements in the plant kingdom
Colour in a carnivorous plant is anthocyanin, the same pigment as in red cabbage, and in full sun the traps of these forms turn from blood to near-black. We keep nine of them, raised from division and tissue culture, never from the wild.
Dionaea muscipula ‘Akai Ryu’
“Red Dragon”: an all-red Venus flytrap. Petioles and traps stay deep burgundy in full sun. Ours are grown hard, winter-cold outdoors, and sold in their second year.
See the plantSarracenia leucophylla
The white-topped pitcher plant of the US Gulf Coast. Tall trumpets whose pale throats are netted with red veins; nectar around the lip does the luring, the throat does the rest.
See the plantNepenthes ‘Bloody Mary’
A compact tropical pitcher plant with dark red pitchers that hang from tendrils at the tips of its leaves. It lives indoors, warm and humid, on our back wall.
See the plant