1 Charles Darwin was a big fan, particularly of the sundews, or Drosera. “It is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal. I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death,” he declared in a letter to botanist Asa Gray in 1863.
2 Sundews get their name from glistening, sticky, hairlike trichomes, which secrete enzymes that digest insects unlucky enough to get stuck.
3 The adaptation of trapping and digesting prey has arisen at least nine times in different plant families in response to soil lacking the nutrients nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.
