A walk through Carnivero’s greenhouses takes you far away from Texas.
The air is heavy with humidity. Bright green succulents sit on racks at your fingertips, beaded with a sticky fluid designed to capture insects. Ten-headed venus flytraps crane their mouths in your direction. Plants nursing pitchers of digestive acid hang in baskets inches away from your head.
You don’t actually have to travel across the world to find these carnivorous critters. Carnivero's nursery, which houses thousands of varieties of rare tropical plants, is a 30-minute drive from downtown Austin. Its brick-and-mortar location opened to the public for the first time Saturday.
Carnivero has been in the Austin area for nearly a decade, but it has primarily operated as an online store.
“It's a niche market, so it's kind of hard to only cater locally,” owner Drew Martinez said. “We've always been online so we can connect with people throughout the country.”
But it was always Martinez’s plan to open a public storefront, host workshops and form a local community for plant enthusiasts.
“I want people to actually come into the greenhouse and be able to touch and feel and see these things, because they really are otherworldly,” he said.
Carnivero satiates the hunger for flesh-eating plants
Martinez’s interest in carnivorous plants started with his own visit to a carnivorous plant nursery when he was 12. He managed a plant collection part-time for years while working in biotech in California.
In 2009, Martinez visited Borneo, an island in Southeast Asia, to see carnivorous plants in the wild.
“I saw a lot of sites that had been decimated by poaching there. And I think that was just purely because there was demand out there, but nobody was really meeting that supply in a sustainable way,” he said.
Martinez wanted to fill that gap by cultivating these plants in the U.S., breeding them to thrive in household conditions and driving prices down to the point where poaching wasn’t profitable. He purchased land near Austin in 2015 and spent a year building the nursery from the ground up before moving here to run Carnivero full-time.
Carnivero does carry expensive stock for hardcore enthusiasts, and has even received a Guinness World Records mention for a particularly pricey sale. But a lot of the plants — especially those in Carnivero’s storefront — are meant for beginners. Many range from $15 to $30.
The big question: What do the nursery’s carnivorous plants eat, and how?
When it comes to Martinez’s favorite species — Nepenthes veitchii, a kind of pitcher plant — the answer is “anything that fits.”
On opening day, Martinez wove through mazes of leaves, vines and pitchers with ease to get to a table full of veitchii. He gently lifted a red pitcher the size of a large mango as he explained how the plant traps and drowns prey in its digestive fluids.
Prey usually means insects, but “the stray rodent has landed into the pitcher,” he said. “Sometimes they get amphibians, reptiles. We’ll find all kinds of stuff.”
Not all carnivorous plants are predators, though. Some of the most interesting relationships they have with animals are symbiotic, Martinez said.
One of them, Nepenthes lowii, looks much like the other pitcher plants in the greenhouse — except for the foamy white substance bubbling from its upper lid. That’s sugar the plant grows to attract a certain kind of shrew in the wild. But the plant isn’t hungry for shrew.
It’s hungry for shrew poop.
The animals “come and lick the lid of the pitcher multiple times a day,” Martinez said. “In the process, there's scat. They poop into this pitcher. … It rains, the scat washes down into the pitcher and it uses that to grow.”
It’s a win-win: The plant is able to get hard-to-find nutrients from the scat, and the shrew gets a sweet treat that “tastes like lemon sherbet,” Martinez said.
How does he know?
“Yeah, I’ve tried it,” he laughed.
The plants hail from all over the world — but some are Texas natives
Many of Carnivero’s plants are native to faraway places like Indonesia and Madagascar. The store works with overseas nurseries and conservation organizations to import plants or seeds. Carnivero’s tissue culture lab then breeds them over generations, selecting the genes that make them prettier or easier to grow.
“Often it's a single seed or just this little amount of leaf [that] can give us hundreds and thousands of plants,” said Hali’a Eastburn, lab manager at Carnivero.
Eastburn helps raise the plantlets in a nutrient-rich solution within the lab before transitioning them to the greenhouses. The greenhouses are split into carefully temperature-controlled zones that simulate the plants’ native environments, from the top of a mountain all the way down to the hot, humid sea-level tropics.
The elaborate setup at Carnivero might sound intimidating to the beginner grower.
“These plants, I think, have a reputation of being tricky or advanced because people don't recognize them as plants, or they're intimidated by the fact that they need insect carnivory to survive,” Eastburn said.
But Carnivero’s goal for many of its species is for them to thrive in a regular household.
Many just need high-quality water, lots of sun and the occasional bug (dead or alive). Some carnivorous plants are even homegrown Texans, Eastburn said. There are pitcher plants native to East Texas and carnivorous sundews found as close as Bastrop.
“The only thing that separates an advanced plant grower and a beginner is the advanced plant growers have just killed more plants,” Eastburn said.
Carnivero wants to turn fascination into conservation
Carnivero’s mission of sustainability is front-and-center. Martinez also works as a carnivorous plant specialist for the International Union for Conservation of Nature, a group known for its “red list” tracking endangered species. He said he has collaborated with other scientists to breed and genetically preserve plants that are on the verge of extinction.
“There's a lot of plants that we have here where we have more genetic diversity on the grounds here than there is in the wild,” he said.
But there’s a subtler mission Martinez hopes to accomplish with his new storefront.
“There's few things in the world that I feel like disarm people automatically — like they just go back to being a kid,” he said. Carnivorous plants are one of them.
When people see them, “they're just so amazed or awestruck that you're able to have a lot of really interesting conversations … [about] amazing aspects of evolution and science and their ecology, talking about habitats, fragile ecosystems,” he said. “I hope to have a place where people can sit down on our patio outside the storefront and talk.”
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