When I first stumbled across a book on carnivorous plants, I realized how mistaken I was about them from pop culture. In real life, they’re still as freaky and fun as they are in Little Shop of Horrors, but for entirely different reasons.
The Savage Garden: Cultivating Carnivorous Plants by Peter D’Amato and Killer Plants: Growing and CAring for Flytraps, Pitcher Plants, and Other Deadly Fauna by Molly Williams.
3 fun facts about carnivorous plants:
Carnivorous plants will die if you care for them too well
They thrive in inhospitable conditions, so if you prepare nourishing soil for them, they’ll die. Instead, they’ll flourish if youCharles Darwin was so fascinated by carnivorous plants that he wrote a book about them!
Darwin studied carnivorous plants for years, especially the Drosera, which he was especially interested in them because of how various species had evolved to be carnivorous in order to survive in inhospitable conditions.Carnivorous plants should more accurately be called “insectivorous” plants
It was Charles Darwin who coined the term in his 1875 book, Insectivorous Plants. Carnivorous plants don’t ingest all types of animals, only insects, thus his preference for the term.
A page featuring Venus Flytraps from Molly Williams’s informative and entertaining book Killer Plants.
As I was developing the plot of The Alchemist of Monsters and Mayhem, facts I’d learned about carnivorous plants came into play as I developed a whole conservatory of strange plants. I haven’t attempted to grow any myself, but I enjoyed spending time with them in fiction.