Be careful when you next go into your garden: It’s full of killers. You may be familiar with carnivorous plants such as the Venus flytrap, sundew, or pitcher plant, but a surprising number of plants could be classified as carnivorous—including your geraniums and potentillas.
Many true carnivorous plants have surprisingly good relationships with insects. Some pitcher plants feed ants and give them a secure home, others are complete miniature ecosystems, homes for creatures ranging from mosquitoes to frogs. A few have even turned vegetarian and eat leaves or, even stranger, serve as rest rooms for tree shrews and subsist on their droppings. Once you delve deep enough, nothing in the world of carnivorous plants is quite what it seems.
Steve Nicholls, a wildlife filmmaker with a lifelong interest in botany and horticulture who has produced and directed several films on carnivorous plants, examines this amazing natural world in intimate detail.
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