Insects are doomed once they get close to a carnivorous plant, as school pupils have been discovering, writes Jane Powers
The girls of second class at Mater Dei Primary School, on Basin Lane in Dublin, have no doubts about what carnivorous plants feed on. "Insects!" they shout happily. They met several kinds of meat-eating vegetation in the glasshouses of the National Botanic Gardens last year, yet they're not quite sure where else these curious plants live other than at Glasnevin. When asked, a mass "hmmmmmmm" of squirmy indecision grips the class until one little hand slowly rises at the back of the room. It's Niamh: "They live somewhere where there is not much soil, and they have to eat insects instead of soil."
She's right: carnivorous plants live in places where the soil is impoverished, and in particular lacking nitrogen, which is supplied by the protein from insects or other unlucky creepy-crawlies. Habitats are always moist, and include mountainsides, forests and sphagnum bogs, such as Irish boglands. The Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula), from coastal areas of North and South Carolina, is a favourite with the Mater Dei eight-year-olds. Its yawning traps, with their luscious pink insides and interlocking jaws, are the stuff of cartoons, speedily snapping shut around their hapless prey, which they digest with enzymes.
"When the bug goes inside it tickles the hairs on the trap, and it shuts," one of the girls explains. "And then it eats it. It mashes it up, and it looks disgusting," she says with relish. The pitcher plants (Sarracenia), also from North America, are another favourite, with their clusters of elongated and hooded trumpets.
Here the insect is lured into the maw of the red-veined trumpet by nectar secretions around its mouth. The small creature crawls over the lip, tumbles down a waxy slide and crashes through a thick barrier of downward-pointing hairs - through which there is no return. Its doomed progress was ably demonstrated to the girls by glasshouse foreman Brendan Sayers, who, it seems, sacrificed a digit in the process. Megan explains breathlessly: "One plant, Brendan put his finger in it, and it got caught!"
The girls' trip to the botanic gardens was part of a five-week programme called Plant an Idea, for which five classes from five Dublin schools made a series of mosaic panels inspired by carnivorous plants.
After the visit to the glasshouses at Glasnevin to explore the strange and alluring world of meat-eating plants, the children moved to the Ark cultural centre, in Temple Bar, where they worked with Laura O'Hagan, a mosaic artist.
At the Ark, the Mater Dei girls (and all the other children, one suspects) especially enjoyed smashing up the tiles with hammers to create the pieces for the mosaics. It was more difficult to draw the shapes of the plants and "to keep the right-coloured tiles between the lines", and then to stick the tiles down.
The result, however, is a series of mosaic panels, a pair from each of the participating schools: St Paul's CBS, North Brunswick Street; Loreto Primary School, Crumlin; Central Model Senior School, Marlborough Street; O'Connell's Boys' National School, North Richmond Street; and Mater Dei.
The mosaics are joyful, free and, in some cases, near-abstract celebrations of the fascinating, creature-eating curiosities of the vegetable kingdom. The plants to which they pay tribute are unlikely to be forgotten by the children involved - and will be remembered with fondness by at least one Mater Dei girl.
"When I was eating my lunch a spider came and got on my apple," she recounts. "It was all black and hairy. So I told Brendan, and he gave the spider to one of the plants. It was a good day for the plant."
The Plant an Idea mosaics are on show at the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin, until February 28th. In March they will be installed permanently at the Ark Children's Cultural Centre, Temple Bar, Dublin