Pitcher Plant
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a plant with leaves transformed into cups or pitchers. These "pitchers" are exceedingly curious organs. A sticky liquid is usually found at the bottom of the cup in which insects are held and apparently digested. There are two groups of pitcher plants. A tropical Malay group includes about thirty-five species. The pitchers are on the ends of the leaves and are shaped like mugs, bottles, or trumpets, varying in size from three to twelve inches in length, and from one to nine inches in diameter. In color they are red, yellow, scarlet, and green, spotted, streaked, or plain. The Rajah of Borneo has pitchers a foot deep and nine inches wide. Some pitcher plants are swamp plants, some terrestrial, and one, with a hairy, bulging, green pitcher, nine by three inches, with a spreading yellow lip, grows as an air plant, twenty to a hundred feet above ground, on the forest trees of Borneo. In comparison with these gorgeous, tropical hothouse marvels, our American pitcher plants are exceedingly modest; but anyone who has sat on the sphagnum moss of a bog beside his first pitcher plant need envy no tropical collector or owner of a conservatory. The pitcher plant, side-saddle flower, or huntsman's cup of the eastern United States grows in bogs; several upright pitcher-shaped leaves grow in a cluster around a perennial root; a single flower stalk carries a single nodding purple flower; the style is expanded into an umbrella, overarched by five fiddle-shaped petals. A yellow pitcher plant, called the trumpet-flower, is found in the bogs of Virginia and southward. The California pitcher plant grows at an altitude of 5,000 feet in the sphagnum bogs of the Sierra Nevadas, along with sundews and rushes. An array of bristles pointing downward prevents the return of an insect once started down the mouth of the slender twisted pitcher.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's cautious "apparently digested" has been settled: the pitchers secrete genuine digestive enzymes, including the protease nepenthesin first characterised in Nepenthes in the 1960s, and the California pitcher plant Darlingtonia described here turns out to secrete little or none of its own, depending instead on resident bacteria and insect larvae to break down its prey. The tropical Malay group Aiton's put at "about thirty-five species" now stands at over 160 named Nepenthes, with new ones still being described — among them the giant Nepenthes attenboroughii from Palawan in 2009. Field work since has also shown that some pitchers are not simple traps at all: Nepenthes lowii harvests the droppings of tree shrews that visit to lick nectar, and N. hemsleyana rents pitcher space to roosting bats in exchange for their guano. Against that, the plants are far scarcer than in 1910: Nepenthes are listed under CITES, and the American bogs where a reader was invited to sit "on the sphagnum moss" have been drained wholesale, leaving Sarracenia oreophila federally endangered.
Written for this edition, 2026.