_Sarracenea purpurea_
_Flower_--Deep reddish purple, sometimes partly greenish, pink, or red,
2 in. or more across, globose; solitary, nodding from scape 1 to 2 ft.
tall. Calyx of 5 sepals, with 3 or 4 bracts at base; 5 overlapping
petals, enclosing a yellowish, umbrella-shaped dilation of the style,
with 5 rays terminating in 5-hooked stigmas; stamens indefinite.
_Leaves:_ Hollow, pitcher-shaped through the folding together of their
margins, leaving a broad wing; much inflated, hooded, yellowish green
with dark maroon or purple lines and veinings, 4 to 12 in. long, curved,
in a tuft from the root.
_Preferred Habitat_--Peat-bogs; spongy, mossy swamps.
_Flowering Season_--May-June.
_Distribution_--Labrador to the Rocky Mountains, south to Florida,
Kentucky, and Minnesota.
“What’s this I hear
About the new carnivora?
Can little plants
Eat bugs and ants
And gnats and flies?
A sort of retrograding:
Surely the fare
Of flowers is air
Or sunshine sweet;
They shouldn’t eat
Or do aught so degrading!”
There must always be something shocking in the sacrifice of the higher
life to the lower, of the sensate to what we are pleased to call the
insensate, although no one who has studied the marvellously intelligent
motives that impel a plant’s activities can any longer consider the
vegetable creation as lacking sensibility. Science is at length giving
us a glimmering of the meaning of the word universe, teaching, as it
does, that all creatures in sharing the One Life share in many of its
powers, and differ from one another only in degree of possession, not in
kind. The transition from one so-called kingdom into another presumably
higher one is a purely arbitrary line marked by man, and often
impossible to define. The animalcule and the insectivorous plant know no
boundaries between the animal and the vegetable. And who shall say that
the sundew or the bladderwort is not a higher organism than the amoeba?
Animated plants and vegetating animals parallel each other. Several
hundred carnivorous plants in all parts of the world have now been named
by scientists.
It is well worth a journey to some spongy, sphagnum bog to gather clumps
of pitcher-plants which will furnish an interesting study to an entire
household throughout the summer while they pursue their nefarious
business in a shallow bowl on the veranda. A modification of the petiole
forms a deep, hollow pitcher having for its spout a modification of the
blade of the leaf. Usually the pitchers are half filled with water and
tiny drowned victims when we gather them. Some of this fluid must be
rain, but the open pitcher secretes much juice, too. Certain relatives,
whose pitchers have hooded lids that keep out rain, are nevertheless
filled with fluid. On the Pacific Coast the golden jars of _Darlingtonia
californica_, with their overarching hoods, are often so large and
watery as to drown small birds and field mice. Note in passing that
these otherwise dark prisons have translucent spots at the top, whereas
our pitcher-plant is lighted through its open transom.
A sweet secretion within the pitcher’s rim, which some say is
intoxicating, others that it is an anesthetic, invites insects to a
fatal feast. It is a simple enough matter for them to walk into the
pitcher over the band of stiff hairs pointing downward like the withes
of a lobster pot, that form an inner covering, or to slip into the well
if they attempt crawling over its polished upper surface. To fly upward
in a perpendicular line, once their wings are wet, is additionally
hopeless, because of the hairs that guard the mouth of the trap; and
so, after vain attempts to fly or crawl out of the prison, they usually
sink exhausted into a watery grave.
When certain plants live in soil that is so poor in nitrogen compounds
that proteid formation is interfered with, they have come to depend more
or less on a carnivorous diet. The sundew actually digests its prey with
the help of a gastric juice similar to what is found in the stomach of
animals; but the bladderwort and pitcher-plants can only absorb in the
form of soup the products of their victims’ decay. Flies and gnats
drowned in these pitchers quickly yield their poor little bodies; but
owing to the beetle’s hard shell covering, many a rare specimen may be
rescued intact to add to a collection.
A similar ogre plant is the yellow-flowered Trumpet-leaf (_S. flava_)
found in bogs in the Southern states.