Listen to Bartram’s Passage on Pitcher Plants:
(Opening stanza by Trip Shakespeare from song “The Slacks”)“Taste of it–how cool and animating–limpid as the morning dew”
That William drank the water caught in the pitcher plant–this is what stands out to me. And later on in this passage he remarks on the insects caught inside the pitcher plant: “…what quantities there are of them!” Did he, when drinking from the pitcher plant, tasting its waters, strain out the insects with his teeth? Yuck, yuck yuck! And even if he did so, the water inside the pitcher plant would likely contain dissolved insect guts, right? I guess he got some protein along with waters as limpid as the morning dew!
In search of Sarracenia:
To find Sarracenia to photograph, I asked my guide at the Okefenokee Swamp to take us to some. We went into some shallows in the swamp, and ran right up onto the pitcher plants. It was too swampy to get out of the boat, so I stood on the front of the boat to photograph them. The picture above gives a good sense of their habitat, swampy, with a ground full of peat.
Due to the season, January, most of the pitcher plants were shriveled and dried, but this one still has the coloring and fleshy-ness of a warmer season.
“But whether the insects…serve as aliment or support to these kind of plants, is doubtful.”
This last statement by William on the insect-catching pitcher plants is interesting to me, because he was, of course, wrong. Pitcher plants grow in nutrient poor soil, or not in soil at all, but in peat, and rely very much on the insects they catch for nutrients. (As did William, apparently, in drinking the waters). In fact, the roots of the pitcher plants serve as anchors to support the plants, and don’t absorb many nutrients, as the soil they are in has few.
I played around with the image above to create a new piece. I liked using a close-up as a starting image, the results were different than in some of my other pieces, and pleasing.
