Sparking a Green Thumb’s Interest

Posted in Around the Garden on November 10 2011, by Matt Newman

While walking through the Enid A. Haupt Conservatory this afternoon, I found myself taken with a little plant–squat, a bit ragged, and looking almost sinister for its petite size. The nostalgia, however, was too much to gloss over.

For most kids, horticulture isn’t a hobby fallen into casually. It’s more often a topic reserved for the science classroom, where frustrated 6th grade teachers scrap and claw to gain even the most tentative hold on their students’ attention. And past the Bunsen burners, wedged somewhere in between lessons on cell walls and chlorophyll, there sits the smallest concession to fun: Dionaea muscipula–the Venus flytrap.

Beauty can be a difficult concept for the young, an abstraction that needs a nurtured understanding through age, art, and experience. Resplendent sweetgum trees and the nodding fronds of forest ferns are near-meaningless to most at that age, which is when carnivorous plants–with their otherworldly pods and toothy mouths–become curriculum heroes. This was the case for me so many years ago, when I saw my first flytrap on the window sill of my elementary science classroom.

Like owl pellets and the egg drop, the hydra-like flytrap has become a school staple. It boasts a few important lessons on the bizarre evolutionary branches of the living world. But more importantly, it’s a gateway into the field of horticulture, disguising the possibility of an engaging lifelong hobby behind the novel act of feeding flies to a plant. And it doesn’t hurt that your average Venus flytrap looks like an extra from the set of Little Shop of Horrors, either. Few kids can pass up something so devilish.

Wandering past that small bundle of “mouths” on stems in the Conservatory, I immediately felt the need to put one on my sill at home. Of course, not everyone begins a love affair with horticulture through scruffy little carnivores. What was the plant that spurred your interest?