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 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • | 6 Comments »

carnivorous plants in action

I’ve had a cou­ple recent posts on insects. While I’ll on the sub­ject it looks like there’s a whole sub­cul­ture of insect snuff films on YouTube. Notice that the “no ani­mals were harmed dur­ing the film­ing of this video” assur­ance appears nowhere on any of these videos… Here are a cou­ple show­ing droseras in action:


You can read up on how the insides of the sar­race­nia pitcher plants are lined with hairs that point down­wards, into “the drink,” mak­ing escape almost impos­si­ble for small insects. Or you can see it for your­self:

And what col­lec­tion of car­niv­o­rous plant videos would be com­plete with­out one show­ing a venus fly­trap doing its thing:

March 31 2008 | Categories: gardening | Tags: • • • • • • • | 1 Comment »