Brian HoweyYour 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 mouths 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.
Nepenthes pitchers come fuzzy, spotted, and striped; petite, lanky, and globous. One type makes traps the size of a human head and eats rodent feces—and the rodents, if they’re not careful. Another has hooked black fangs ringing its maw, as if Mother Nature commissioned H. R. Giger to design a plant. All the rage in the Victorian era, Nepenthes have made a comeback in the world of houseplant collecting in recent years, accelerated by a combination of increased availability and a burst of plant lust on the part of stuck-at-home, social media–fueled urbanites decking out their abodes with potted greenery. (Seventy percent of millennials, according to one survey, identify as “plant parents.”)
But buyers beware: Nepenthes collecting—as I eventually learned almost too well—is next-level stuff. There’s a lot more to these plants than fertilizer and YouTube how-tos. They’re botanical prima donnas, liable to walk out on life without notice if their specific needs aren’t met. And your new hobby will shove you into a strange world. There’s something dark in the pits of those pitchers, and it’s not the rotting bugs. If you fall in, you may land in an acidic soup of crime, addiction, and existential angst.
Mat Orchard thought he could handle Nepenthes. They nearly ate him alive.
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