Terms

Carnivorous plants are amongst nature's most intriguing flora and enjoy unprecedented popularity with gardeners to-day.

The remarkable ability of these plants to lure, capture and consume insects and unwanted pest forms sets them apart, through recent botanical findings.

Some scientists are thought to believe that they might have been introduced by aliens from other planets, but we believe that these plants developed before and during the dinosaur period when planet Earth was poor of nutrients in the soil and the air was swarmed with a lot of insects. Some have developed tentacles like the sundews, the snapping lobes of the venus fly trap, and the slippery baited pitfalls of the pitcher plants - they all provide the stuff of which science fiction is made.

Yet far from being fantasy, these extraordinary organisms are fact. They have beautiful flowers and colourful leaves. Most carnivorous plants became an endangered species due to farming and draining the bogs and marshland in which these plants prefer moist soil.

We started researching these carnivorous plants over 25 years ago, at that time there were very rare and expensive to buy and were regarded as special novelties for a few collectors, so we decided to produce enough of them so they can be affordable to everyone to buy, not just interesting novelties, carnivorous plants make a handsome contribution to the perennial garden or to the indoor landscape. A good many of these intriguing plants are easy to grow, and some of the most beautiful may thrive in your own living room, they can be as useful housefly control. Many of these species can take temperatures as low as -20°C (-4°F) and many of them catch slugs, wasps and vine weevils.

Technology has gone very fast in the past 20 years but the horticulture business has barely changed in 200 years. You can always go to a supermarket or garden centre to find the same plants, albeit in different colours. But we are introducing new plants for the trade that look beautiful and exotic and that are also working plants that are good for the environment.