I've always wanted to write a good botanical horror novel and last summer an idea hit me
and I'm on about page 200. It's a murder thriller sci-fi horror movie called From a Crevice in Hell.
Back in the 60s when I was a kid I loved monster movies and I subscribed to a very popular magazine
called Famous Monsters Magazine. They always had little advertisements for things like Venus
Flytraps and my collection just started to grow and grow and I became addicted and people always
wanted to know where they could buy carnivorous plants and there really just wasn't anywhere
available so that's why I started California Carnivores. We started back about 1989 and we were
the first carnivorous plant nursery in the world to be open to the public. We house probably the
largest collection of carnivorous plants in the world somewhere over a thousand different varieties.
The main genuses that we grow and that are popular in the hobby are of course Venus Flytraps always
number one. American pitcher plants are very very popular. Tropical pitcher plants and there's several
of them that get large enough to eat rats and other animals in the wild. Another huge group of
plants are the sundews and this was the plant that Charles Darwin once wrote that he cared more
about sundews than the origin of all the species of life on earth. Venus Flytraps are Dioneia.
Tropical pitcher plants the genus name is Nepenthes. Sundews it's Drosera. American pitcher plants are
Saracenia. Butter warts are Pinguicula. Bladder warts are Eutricularia. A lot of these plants
take a long time to grow. If we were to grow fly traps from seed it would take about three four
to five years to produce a mature plant. Some plants like sundews can be mature in a couple
of years but other ones like pitcher plants we don't usually start selling them until they're
about three years old. So this is our propagation room right here you can see seeds of American
pitcher plants that I just sown this this winter. These are ones they're discriminating here too
this year next to them and you can see there's a little that's its personal leaf and that's the
that's a trap. Carnivorous plants no matter where they come from around the world they usually come
from very similar habitats and these plants through various methods from sticky glue like traps
to pitchers that contain digestive juices and have nectar that lores insects and drugs them
to venous fly traps that have trigger hairs where the leaves actually snap shut on their prey
they've evolved to catch these insects and animals and turn them into nutrients. I've got some
mule worms here delicious mule worms these actually don't do anything for the closing
of the trap what they do is they force the insects to get to the nectar that's right on the inside
so we're going to give a shot here we'll drop some more in there
and now it's going to take about five or six days of putting acids and enzymes
in between the surface of the leaf and it just slowly dissolves it and sucks up all the fertilizers
it needs. So this is an American pitcher plant pitcher and I'm going to do a pitcher autopsy now
at least that's what we call it. We're going to cut it open and see all the bugs that this
pitcher caught just in one season and you can see whole insects flies and yellowjackets up to the
top here all the way down to broken down bug parts that's almost like coffee grounds and she's
pulling all the fertilizer it needs right into the leaf the same way your stomach pulls food indeed.
After people get over the initial attraction of the fact that these plants are carnivorous
is that they're beautiful a lot of these plants look like they are from other worlds
with incredible coloration and shapes and these plants don't just sit there in the summertime
it's very amusing to sit there and see flies buzzing around them and getting caught. Some people
especially kids you know they'll give their plants names and hand feed them it's almost
like having a pet that you don't have to take out for a walk.
