Here, half buried in the moss, I found hundreds of crimson-veined Pitcher
Plants, or Side-Saddle Flowers (_Sarracenia purpurea_), which bear
olive-green, purple-veined, vase-like leaves that hold rain and dew.
Often the species varies in color, and its absolute greenish-yellow with
lighter green veinings. Many of the larger pitchers hold fully a tumbler
of fluid. Their brilliant-hued brims are edged with crimson ridges,
delicately coated with honey, thus enticing flies and moths to drink from
the nectar beyond the brim. The more common prisoners are small flies
and moths, but one day I found two dozen snails captive in the larger
leaves of an ancient plant, for if once within, there is no escape even
for snails. Consequently the Pitcher Plants—locally called St. Jacob’s
Dippers and Dumb Watches by the children—are considered carnivorous
plants, since they are flesh-eating by nature. This is also true of the
small Round-leaved Sundew (_Drosera rotundifolia_).
These plants are traps that not only cunningly entice, but actually
entrap and slowly devour their victims. Sundew delights in being fed
beefsteak, and Professor Bailey cites Darwin’s experiment of feeding them
steak, which “they accepted as readily as an insect.”[7] The Sundew is
plentiful in these mossy bogs. It has red and white, dewy, bristling,
round leaves, with long petioles spreading in a tuft. When a small fly or
ant touches these sticky bristles or tentacles on the upper face of the
leaf, the points of the outer row slowly turn inward, holding their prey
closely until it is dead.
[Illustration: =Round-Leaved Sundew.= (_Drosera rotundifolia._)]
Like the enticing honey of the Pitcher Plant, the viscid fluid of the
Sundew attracts the flies, and, once alighted upon it, they become
entangled and doomed to certain death. After drawing the juices from
their victim or bits of steak, they relax and slowly regain their normal
positions. The glands of these leaves send out drops of a clean, sticky
fluid which glitter like dew drops in the sunlight. The plant sends up
a short spike of insignificant, whitish-green, bud-like flowers, which
are said to open briefly one by one in their turn, each morning in the
sunshine, till the whole spike has unfolded. Each flower turns brown and
fades before the successive bud unfolds, so that there is never more than
one full-grown flower to be seen at a time. This is not the case with
the flowers of the Pitcher Plant. I found many crimson, ball-like buds
sleeping tucked up in their mossy beds. They would be in their prime in a
week or ten days.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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