Venus Fly Trap Digesting, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger.

Parenthood has led me down many unexpected avenues: towards emotional and spiritual growth, endless nights without sleep, hospital vigils, the sweetness and imagination of little kids, and an impossible level of mess.

But I never expected, as my wife put it the other day, to be pimping for a plant. The plant in question is this carniverous Venus fly trap, dionaea muscipula. We also as of a few days ago have a meat-eating pitcher plant, nepenthes alata.

Both meat-eaters are due to Julian, our oldest son, getting interested in the idea of a meat eating plant. The kids think feeding the Venus fly trap a fly with a tweezers is great entertainment. So we go round pimping for the plant, seeing if we can find fresh flies caught recently in spider webs—“Honey, there’s a juicy one in the web in the garage!”