Feed Me! Carnivorous Plants and the Bloody-Fingered People Who Love Them

Not long ago, a dragonfly emerged mysteriously from the soil. It fluttered around inside the tank, a lone unsuspecting wretch in a tank of lovely monsters who’ve evolved over millennia the sneakiest way to eat him. After two days, the dragonfly disappeared.

“I’m thinking about studying botany, plant genetics, that sort of stuff,” Hicks says. “Maybe at UC Berkeley.”

Jessica Miller

Touch it, if you dare: The dangerously beautiful Venus flytrap

Jessica Miller

Dr. Frankensnyder, we presume

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More About

• Ivan Snyder
• Wesley Hicks
• Los Angeles Carnivorous Plant Society
• Carnivorous Plant Society
• Alhambra

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Another kid in the Society, 10-year-old Brendon, is getting seriously into plants. For a while, Hicks was babysitting Brendon’s Drosera scorpioideses. Brendon calls Hicks every day for plant advice. “Nooo!” cries Hicks, when Brendon gets impatient and tries to acclimate a plant to low humidity too quickly. “You have to cover it in a bag, then just hunker down, and open it an inch every few days.”

There are so many plants to collect. It’s tough to decide. Nepenthes bicalcarata looks like it has fangs, which ooze with nectar. Hicks likes the new hairy red variant of Nepenthes hamata, which was discovered last year. A single plant costs $150, sports wicked-looking violet hairs and has a pitcher lip that looks like it has black razor teeth. These teeth trap snails, which slither into the pitcher ... of doom. But they don’t grow in the climate of Hicks’ room. “People have grown them in small wine refrigerators, or a tub of water that you half fill with ice every night. Or you use refrigerator coolant tubes. You have to put it into your schedule.”

He was online the other night at midnight, shortly after he’d shut off the tank lights and given his plants a snack of brine shrimp and their usual 11 p.m. misting. He got into a bidding war with someone else in the society on eBay over a fuzzy pitcher plant. It went to the other guy for $25. Oh well. Good thing Hicks is also interested in a Nepenthes bellii, a small climbing pitcher plant that likes to scramble horizontally along the ground while it’s young.

“It’ll be all dramatic,” he says, “and I’ll be very proud of it.”

Los Angeles Carnivorous Plant Society, monthly meetings at Alhambra Chamber of Commerce, 104 S. First St., Alhambra, www.geocities.com/lacps.