From The Danger Garden

Spring is a nice time in Southern California.  Like Springs everywhere plants here begin to grow again.  And so it is with Leslie's collection of carnivorous plants.  We call them CPs for short.  She has a lot of CPs in her garden.  It's a dangerous place to be if you're an insect.

(Click on any picture for better viewing.)

In the winter she cuts these little insect-meat eaters back and we wait for new shoots to sprout out in the brighter sun and higher temperatures.  Or maybe we wait for new sprouts to shoot out.  This year has not disappointed.  In fact it's been downright amazing.  I have taken many photographs.

Leslie grows multiple varieties of Saracennia, commonly known as Pitcher Plants.  These bad boys trap their unsuspecting little buggers in tall horn-like pitchers.  The pitchers have a cap on them giving them the profile of a large animal with its mouth open.

The different varieties are colored with combinations of green and red and white.  There are colored veins of great intricacy.  And little hairs that help ensnare dinner.

Before the pitchers form, they send out thin stalks with a round bulb on the end.  This becomes the flower with droopy petals.

The plants send out flat stalks which slowly open into the pitchers.  Then they just spend the rest of the year waiting for food to fly right in.

Leslie has many other varieties of CPs.  Here are a few pictures of Sundews.  This guys full name is Drosera capensis.  Sundews catch their food using little balls of stickum from which a hapless six-legger can't escape.  Clever.

Here's a drosera flower stalk with delicate purple flowers.  Apparently there's a good reason CPs have tall flower stalks.  They need to trick insects into pollinating them.  If the flowers are too close to the parts of the plant which catch the insects, pollination won't happen.  Once the plant sex is over, however, the insect is back on the menu.

Other Mixed Meters posts in which carnivorous plants play a role.
Freud Was Wrong About the Cigar
Carnivorous Plants (with pictures of many different types of CPs)