Garden Centre

Friday, June 8, 2007

Where the really wild things are ...

Okay, a little extremity today. I can't show you a picture of this, because it's not actually in bloom yet, but my wild garden is actually a bit wilder than you might think, because around the edge of my pond I planted a bog, and in the bog, I planted - carnivores!

Yeah, really - in fact there are several native carnivorous plants like sundews, butterworts and bladderworts. I grow sundews, which are pink to red coloured plants, covered with glistening blobs held on long hairs, like threads of molten glass – they are actually very pretty creatures, I mean plants! The thing you have to remember if you want to grow them is that just about all the native sundews actually thrive in nutrient-poor environments, which means wet, peaty situations which are low in nitrogen and phosphate. Give them too much soil nutrient and they die – weird but true. It’s because they are designed to get nutrients from insects and (1) the wrong insects turn up in rich soil areas and don’t land on the plants, so they starve, (2) the overabundance of nitrogen in the soil poisons the plant.

How do they work?

I’m glad you asked, because it’s pretty gory - the red hairs or filaments are more like tentacles which respond when something lands on them or the plant surface by bending inwards to trap and hold the prey in a sort of living cage by means of the sticky mucilage at their tips. Initial reaction begins within ten seconds which is not Bruce Lee fast, but it’s still quite impressive to watch.

If you’re interested in growing carnivorous plants in the UK, by which I mean outdoors, rather than in special tanks (I always think ‘Little Shop of Horrors’ when I come across people growing carnivorous plants indoors) these people are the business.

When planning your carnivore garden, remember that it needs to be nutrient poor and you have to be able to stop animals like cats and dogs trampling on it as the plants are highly sensitive to damage – it has to be nutrient poor, which may mean actually bringing in poor soil and large plants must not shade out the bog – light is necessary for many carnivorous plants to thrive, which is the opposite of normal ponds, where shade is valued because it stops algae and other nasties taking hold of the water because they breed so fast.

Not all of these plants are fully hardy in England, and there’s no real data on how well they do in other countries, so you may have to protect them (I do) with cloches over the winter nights.

Labels: bog plants, carnivorous plants, garden ponds, garden secrets, sundew

The All Seasons Gardener at 3:25 AM

---