California Pitcher Plant (Darlingtonia californica)

Near Eight-Dollar Mountain, Selma, OR, 4/2015.

The only carnivorous plant native to the west coast. This strange-looking member of the pitcher plant family (not a lily, as some might assume from its other common name,”Cobra lily”) lures insects into its tubular leaves (shown below), only to trap them there to drown and digest them. The nodding somewhat plastic-looking flower (above) rises above the leaves on a separate stalk in the spring, then new leaves appear in the early summer. We found fresh flowers amid last year’s leaves at Eight Dollar Mountain in mid-April, and hope to update this post with fresh (yellow-green) leaves later this season.

The plant is rare, not because it’s hard to find or endangered, but because of its small domain. That said, nine Oregon counties are home to it, as it occurs in the serpentine soils of the Klamath-Siskiyou Mountains, and along the Oregon-California coast. Eight other members from another genus of the pitcher plant family, Sarraceniaceae, are native to the eastern U.S. and Canada. The only other carnivorous plant in the U.S. is the well-known Venus Fly Trap, also native to the east coast.

Surprisingly, meat-eating is not that strange an occurrence in the plant world. More than 600 carnivorous species exist in “at least 9 families”, according to this “carnivorous plant fact sheet“, from the Flora of North America Association. More surprisingly, the same source goes on to say that “carnivory originated independently multiple times” in the evolutionary process of several different families of plants.

Near Eight-Dollar Mountain, Selma, OR, 4/2015.

In several spots along Eight Dollar Mountain, near Selma, Oregon, pitcher plants grow in giant groupings in what are called “fens” — flat, marshy spots where water seeps up from underground.

Near Eight-Dollar Mountain, Selma, OR, 4/2015.

Update: We were lucky enough to find some great fens around Gumboot lake (see photo below) filled with a mid-summer riot of Darlingtonia and other bog plants (including the endemic Rushlily and Bog Asphodel). We recently learned that the Klamath-Siskiyou Ecoregion at the California-Oregon border contains the largest serpentine outcropping in North America. Active plate tectonics in the area allow select locations for the escape of low-nitrogen serpentine rock, pushed up from the molten ‘mantle’ churning deep below the Earth’s surface.