When I was a kid in California in the 1970s, you could buy Cobra Lillies (Darlingtonia californica) in plastic bags at the local KMart Garden Center, so I grew up killing them while the rest of the world was torturing their first Venus Flytraps (Dionaea muscipula). ​And I remember ordering my first World Insectivorous Plants catalog, drooling over the sundews, and dreaming of building a greenhouse window in my bedroom.

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As a newlywed in 1990 I bought my first Venus Flytrap - that lived - out of pity while on a search for vacuum cleaner bags in the Reisterstown (Md.) Woolworth's. The plants were languishing in the "pet" section of the store, in the dark under a shelf, with the fish food and aquarium decorations.

 

Pity is a terrible reason to buy a living thing, but my sad little flytrap survived its first winter as the centerpiece of our apartment dining table. By the following spring it had even divided, giving me TWO living venus flytraps.​ And buoyed by this newfound and likely unfounded confidence, I bought a Purple Pitcher Plant (Sarracenia purpurea) at the Cylburn Arboretum plant sale in Baltimore.

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<saw first pitcher plant in 1994 - Croatan National Forest>

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That was the extent of my collection for a number of years - I was still foolishly enamored with African Violets and Miltonia orchids - until work travel took me to South Florida, where I met Clyde Bramblett and Bruce Bednar, and then to North Florida where I combined state government research with getting my rental car towed out of ditches in and around Apalachicola National Forest.

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