Meat-Eater Monday: Flowers

Many people think the attractive leaves of many carnivorous plants are flowers.

This is a leaf NOT a flower.

In reality, carnivorous plants have leaves like any other plant -- they are just modified to attract, trap, and eat insects. To reproduce they flowers in the spring, which look more or less like normal flowers.

Venus flytraps and sundews have the most normal looking flowers.

Venus flytrap flowers

American pitcher plant flowers are far more complicated. They all look about the same but can be different colors, peach colored, butter yellow, to red and any range in between.

Is it hard to tell what you're even looking at?

Hopefully, this label picture will help a little. (There are better-labeled photos is you google Sarracenia flower labels)

So basically, the flower hangs upside down. There are five petals hanging down in the dips of the style. There are five stigmas which collect the pollen. The pollen falls down onto the umbrella-like style.

This flower encourages cross-pollination because bees must climb through over the stigma, which collects the pollen from a different flower. The bee then picks up the pollen from this flower and exits by ducking out under the petal.

Becuase of this tendency, American pitcher plant hybrids run rampant in the wild.

Hybrids are fun because they aren't sterile. They can be crossed over and over again, and you can create amazing complex hybrids.

Every year, I try to cover my flowers with cheese cloth so I can pollinate the flowers individually with a Q-tip. This allows me to cross a plant with the pollen from a flower that bloomed earlier in the spring.

I try to keep a close record of the crosses I make, so I have some idea of the ancestry of my plants.

The petals only say on for about 10 days. The flower is able to be pollinated for about a week before the petals fall off and the flower starts tipping upward. It is as if once the flower sheds the weight of the petals, it can look back up to the sky.

A flower after the petals fall off.

Throughout the summer, the seed pod swells until the entire flower drys and turns brown and the seed pod cracks open. The seeds can be harvested in the fall.

seed pod mid-summer

As a general rule, unless you want to try your hand at growing carnivorous plants from seed (it is terribly difficult) it is best to cut off the flowers before they bloom. This will preserve your plant's energy and help it grow bigger, stronger leaves. Producing a flower takes a lot of energy, and unless your plant is healthy and growing in full sunshine outside, it may harm your plant. If it is too stressed, producing a flower might even kill it.

If your plant hasn't had a dormancy or if you divided the rhizome, cut off any flowers it tries to produce.  There is always next year. Let your plant recover its strength.

There is no greater joy than seeing your big, beautiful plant in full bloom and creating your own hybrids can be fun.