Feed Me

Pitcher plants are beautiful, rare, and life-consuming-in every way. How one collector's obsession became a nightmare.

- By Brian Howey. Photographs by Zen Sekisawa

Your Monstera is boring. The pothos hanging from your bookshelf? Yawn. That windowsill cactus collection is, at best, a solid meh. Anyone can grow houseplants that absorb nutrients from the soil, energy from the sun, etc. But if your plants don't consume insect flesh in a gut-sucking display of evolutionary brutality, let's face it: Your collection is basic. To turn your mild-leafed menagerie into the ultimate selfie background, what you need is a Nepenthes.

Nepenthes (pronounced neh-PEN-theeze) is a genus of pitcher plants typically found in Southeast Asia, Australia, and Madagascar. The plants produce vase-shaped contraptions that grow from emerald leaves fanning off a vine, each one topped with a mouthlike opening and shielded from the rain by an umbrella lid. The pitchers secrete a sweet nectar that insects find irresistible and inebriating. After a sip or two, sugar-drunk bugs stumble into the mouth and fall to their doom, landing in a pool of digestive juices enclosed by walls so slippery that even the stickiest-footed fly can't escape. The drowned corpses slowly dissolve, and the pitchers absorb their nutrients like a stomach, allowing Nepenthes plants to grow in nutrient-poor soils. It's this macabre survival strategy that makes the plants so bizarrely beautiful, and so coveted by hobbyists.