My darling Darlingtonia

For a kid, animals rule. Animals fly, run, hunt, sing, dance, hiss, attack, nap, swim, learn, and even snowboard. Plants are just there for landscape and food*. However, there are certain plants children love because they break the typical mold of what they think a plant should be...

CARNIVOROUS PLANTS!

Ok, maybe not anything like what Rick Moranis encountered on the streets of New York in the 1980s but still, quite striking in their own right:

                   

                     

But let's start at the very beginning, with names. 

King              Philip         Came      Over        From         Geneva    Switzerland. 

Kingdom -> Phylum -> Class -> Order -> Family -> Genus -> species

Carnivorous plants fall into three families: Sarraceniaceae, Nepenthaceae, and Droseraceae

Droseraceae: seen worldwide, these are your venus fly traps (photo: above left)

Nepenthaceae: Old World family (South China, Indonesia, Australia, Philippines, etc), tropical pitcher plants (photo: above right)

and....

Sarraceniaceae: New World family (that's where we are!) with 3 genera; two are in North America and they are roughly split east + west coast. Plants in the Sarracenia genus live on the east coast and has about 8-11 species while Darlingtonia is the west coast representative with just one species...

Do you love my dramatic lighting? It looks as though it might move! Also called the Cobra Lilly for obvious reasons. 

Darlingtonia california, the moody only child of the genus, is a rare find in the field. It was initially stumbled up on by the a certain William Brackenridge, assistant botanist of the U.S. Exploring Expedition on Mount Shasta, California in 1841 (but let's face it, he was pretty much the botanist on the voyage...)! My former supervisor when I was interning for the Wilkes Expedition project told me that his journals revealed he had thought he found a new species of Sarracenia, not realizing he was "collecting the most iconic new species of the U.S.Ex.Ex."

It grows in northern CA and southern OR but the very tip top northernmost reaches of its range can slip past the halfway point up the coast of OR. It was this northernmost population I paid a visit to recently with my botanically inclined friend.

These plants are weird and pretty high maintenance:
- prefer serpentine soils (rich in heavy metals and lacking in nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium)
- needs cool running water (probably from a mountain)
- and likes ample sunshine

You can find them in bogs with the afore mentioned properties. The little population we found did not have that much sunlight (but enough) so their characteristic red color was not present. They still proved beautiful specimens:

This whole thing is actually a modified leaf! What you don't see is the whole plant which consists of many stalks radiating out of the center.

The mustache tips secrete a sugary concoction irresistible to insects! They travel up and into the dome of despair looking for more! Note the 'skylights'...

The 'skylights' are areas of thin plant tissue. A bug might try to leave through these false exits but will eventually tire and fall into the murky depths below... 

The skylights are really nice huh? Love how they attenuate down. 

You can't tell form this picture but the stalks grow in a way so that they don't overlap each other. They twist left or right as they extend upward and lean outward. Some stalks I saw were over a foot tall!

The fun thing about this particular species of pitcher plant is that it does not collect rain water to fill its pitcher. Other pitcher plants you see have an open container while this one takes water from its roots depending on how much dead organic stuff is inside. It also does not have its own digestive enzymes to eat the insects but instead relies on bacteria living in the pitcher to do the job.
So...kind of the opposite of what other pitcher plants do I guess? They just have to be different. Anyways I am discovering there is so much more to these plants but this post is getting a little long in the tooth as it is so I will stop. But if you want more Darlingtonia reading go here and here and here.

Til next time!

* My views on plants have changed since 1993.