Story behind the art of Jane Sturgeon

Curious Allies: Mutualism in Fungi, Parasites, and Carnivores

The Fifth New York Botanical Garden Triennial

Nepenthes and House Guest

Nepenthes "Maria", Microphyla nepenthicola

When I was a biology major, we often went out into the field to do observations. One such trip was to a bog. I can’t say where it was in southeastern Wisconsin. Our professor preferred we didn’t know the location to help preserve its small area.

We spent the afternoon walking on the bog’s peat mat, carefully maneuvering amongst pitcher plants and avoiding the “black holes” that were openings in the peat. If you stepped in a black hole you would fall through the mat and might not surface again!

The encounter made me appreciate our fragile ecosystem and our professor’s desire to keep this diminished, threatened environment from overexposure to inexperienced individuals.

My experience, in that bog so many years ago, planted the “mustard seed” for my curiosity about pitcher plants.

The Nepenthes cultivar, Nepenthes ‘Marie’, that I drew was a cast-off from the Chicago Botanic Garden. I was able to observe a variety of Nepenthes at the Garden in the tropical greenhouse. The perfect delicate form is fascinating to me. Think how such a large object can contain a water trap and hang precariously from its mother plant.

The more I read about Nepenthes species the more fascinating I found them. Nepenthes generally live in a very poor, hostile environment that offers them scant nutrition to grow, but like other green plants, they can produce food through photosynthesis, and they survive. They are native to the tropics and have co-evolved a similar carnivory to the pitcher plants of North America that I saw those many years ago at the bog.

Nepenthes species use their special design to obtain additional nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus, often lacking in the poor soils of the plants’ habitats. They entice their victims by various means including color, nectar production, and a sweet, musty, or fungus-like scent. Insects land on the plant and slip and fall into the folded leaf “pitcher,” where a pool of water awaits.

Insects might easily creep down into the body of the pitcher but can’t crawl out, because of downward facing hairs or a slippery surface that make climbing upward difficult. The water contains enzymes that digest the prey. As the insects deteriorate, Nepenthes extracts the necessary nutrients.

Doing more research, I discovered that Nepenthes species are not the “evil” plants that most of us think. They have symbiotic relationships with animals such as ants, tree shrews, and bats. For example, one tiny frog species survives beautifully with Nepenthes ampullaria in Sarawak, Borneo. Males of the frog, Microhyla borneensis can reach just 13 millimeters (about half an inch) long at maturity. A frog sits in a pitcher plant’s trap opening waiting for a meal lured by the plant.

The frog is not denying the plant but is predigesting the insect and providing nitrogen rich waste that the plant needs. In turn the plant provides the frog with protection from predators, a food source, and a place for the frog to lay its eggs on the inner wall of the trap. When the eggs hatch the tadpoles drop into the basin of water and grow to maturity all within one plant.

My first graphite drawing of the Nepenthes was lighter and did not show the dramatic, subtle pattern that confuses insects into thinking the plant is deteriorating organic material. When portraying a plant in graphite, the lack of color means tonal values are crucial in emphasizing the subject’s intricacies. I darkened key areas to elicit the beauty of the plant and reveal its textures and patterns.

My next addition was the frog. Here I took a little artistic license, because my drawing depicts a cultivar rather than the species in which the frog makes its home. I wanted to emphasize the concept that the plant consumes only what it needs to survive and often helps other creatures in their life cycles.

The frog is so tiny that I magnified this male frog by five times. The frog on the plant is actual size and it’s amazing to visualize the size difference between the two depictions.

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