This is one of the WEIRDEST things I have ever seen in the Garden Shop at the local home improvement warehouse. It’s called a “Pitcher Plant” and had a thirty-five dollar price tag, which turned us off from buying one of these for Mom.
The plants we saw each had a number of “vessels’ extending below the baskets in which the plants were growing. They vaguely resembled pitchers, but the similarity ended there.
Wikipedia offers more information about it:
Pitcher plants are carnivorous plants whose prey-trapping mechanism features a deep cavity filled with liquid known as a pitfall trap. It has been widely assumed that the various sorts of pitfall trap evolved from rolled leaves, with selection pressure favouring more deeply cupped leaves over evolutionary time. However, some pitcher plant genera (such as Nepenthes) are placed within clades consisting mostly of flypaper traps: this indicates that this view may be too simplistic, and some pitchers may have evolved from flypaper traps by loss of mucilage.
Whatever their evolutionary origins, foraging, flying or crawling insects such as flies are attracted to the cavity formed by the cupped leaf, often by visual lures such as anthocyanin pigments, and nectar bribes. The sides of the pitcher are slippery and may be grooved in such a way so as to ensure that the insects cannot climb out.
Ewwwww!
Click image to enlarge.
