on the road: every car should have one

I’m just back from a few days with fam­ily in Sebastapol, up in the Russ­ian River and Sonoma Val­ley wine coun­try north of San Fran­cisco. I’ll post on the gar­den des­ti­na­tions I man­aged to drag peo­ple to while we were up there, but I’ll start back­wards with one of the events on the way home yesterday.

On the return trip the car was plagued for a few min­utes by this fly that kept buzzing around the inside of the car, evad­ing all our attempts to shoo it out the win­dows. In the back seat we had three plants that were my sou­venirs from a visit to Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores, a car­niv­o­rous plant spe­cialty nurs­ery that was just five min­utes form the hotel where we stayed. (I’ll post more on the nurs­ery visit later.)

Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis Florida giant 2

One of the plants was this sun­dew, Drosera fil­i­formis ssp. fil­i­formis ‘Florida Giant.’ Well, I think you know where this story is headed…

Fly caught by Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis Florida giant

When we got home John noticed that a fly had been trapped by the sun­dew, most likely the one that had been annoy­ing us at the begin­ning of the trip. That explains why we hadn’t noticed the insect after the first few min­utes of the return trip.

After this expe­ri­ence I’d like to sug­gest that every auto­mo­tive man­u­fac­turer should make a drosera stan­dard equip­ment on all their mod­els, espe­cially for this buggy time of the year…

August 10 2009 05:31 am | Categories: gardening | Tags: • •

6 Responses to “on the road: every car should have one”

  1. tina on 10 Aug 2009 at 2:10 pm #

    Ha! Funny. Not sure a fly eat­ing plant would like my plant but I sure do hate those flies in the car!

  2. jo on 11 Aug 2009 at 12:52 am #

    Nice one, James.
    Did you stay around for the diges­tive process :-) I won­der what acids are in those globules.

  3. Jenny on 11 Aug 2009 at 1:48 am #

    Excel­lent! My plants made it home in o.k. shape. A lit­tle squashed, but not too much worse for the wear. After wan­der­ing through Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores, I have plans to rework my bog garden.

  4. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » on the road: visiting california carnivores on 11 Aug 2009 at 5:45 am #

    […] left the premises with three plants, a cou­ple more than I really have room for in my bog. I posted yes­ter­day about the amaz­ing fly-catching capa­bil­i­ties of the sun­dew I bought (Drosera fil­i­formis ssp. […]

  5. Pomona Belvedere on 15 Aug 2009 at 12:16 am #

    ooooh, I’ve heard about Cal­i­for­nia Car­ni­vores, I believe I read the book by the owner if I’m remem­ber­ing rightly…I ENVY you. You are inspir­ing me to make a field trip there myself. And I think insect-catching plants in cars might be just the kind of inno­va­tion that could save the auto industry.

  6. Pomona Belvedere on 15 Aug 2009 at 12:17 am #

    P.S. love the first drosera photo, especially.

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