CURIOSITIESAS CHILDREN, WE arrived in Ireland from the fabled East, determined to impress our poor little stay-in the-mud cousins. Vividly, we described Sri Lankan leopards that with one bound sprang through the nursery window and arrived, snarling, at the bottom of the bed to be fended off with pillows. We told of snakes that curled round the branches of the trees under which we walked and how elephants trumpeted at dawn around the bungalow - a bit of an exaggeration.
At last, goaded into desperation for the honour of Ireland, Cousin James said that on the farm there were carnivorous plants and, what's more, if we walked in the Marlow, we could see butterworts with our own eyes.
We grew silent and not at all keen to don our wellies for an encounter with a flower hungry for its lunch. Slowly we followed my uncle down to the boggy field near the river. We were cautious as we climbed over the gate.
I was the first to see an elegant blue flower on the end of a long stalk the size and colour of a large viola. My fears diminished, for who could suspect this beautiful blossom of any malicious purpose? But this was just a delusion, as butterworts proved to be every bit as deadly (though only to very small insects) and rather more fascinating than our apocryphal snakes and leopards. The butterwort plant is a rosette of yellowy-green glistening leaves that excludes a glue to entrap an insect. As it struggles, the edges of the leaves curl around to make escape impossible. The prisoner is dissolved by enzymes into digestible components, which are absorbed through the leaf.
The sundew is another species of insectivore that grows on Irish bogs. The spoon-like leaves have hair-like tentacles, each of which has a tiny droplet of what looks like dew, hence the name, but is really a sticky corrosive. When an insect is ensnared, the other tentacles bend towards the victim, further trapping it.
At its centre in Lullymore, Rathangan, Co Kildare, the Irish Peatland Conservation Council has an insect chamber of horrors with the largest carnivorous plant collection in Ireland. Besides the native butterworts, sundews, and the bladderworts that float in water vacuuming up water fleas, there are numerous kinds of showy pitcher plants. An innocent insect, out on the spree, smells delicious nectar not realising that it is spiked with narcotics which will cause it to miss its footing and fall to the bottom of a pitcher to drown in the pool of digestive juices. There is also a Canadian pitcher plant which was introduced 100 years ago to a bog in Longford where it has naturalised. One plant was found to contain the remnants of 205 victims.
Oh how much safer to be a child in the jungles of the East than to be an insect in the bogs of Ireland.
Melosina Lenox-Conyngham