Labors of love: A snappy hobby raising carnivorous plants in north Texas

by Sarah Blaskovich

DALLAS — Paul Riddell crouches next to a gentle-looking green leafy plant, wielding a pocket knife. “I don't mind showing you the toxic part,” he tells me as he slices open the prickly thorn apple on a Datura. “It's only if you eat the seeds that you'll go into a coma.”

In his open palm, not more than 18 inches from my face, Riddell points to the brownish seeds that are benign in appearance but could kill a person instantly. He smiles assuredly. “There's a story to all my plants,” he says.

Riddell is a horticulture enthusiast, most notably for his love for carnivorous plants. On his small apartment patio in north Dallas, he's squeezed a greenhouse full of Venus flytraps, pitcher plants, and bladderworts. He's one of the only people to grow Australian triggerplants, an interesting species of plant that attracts, captures, and digests its prey by whipping its “trigger” forward faster than the eye can see. They eat insects as large as june bugs.

Riddell toils in the greenhouse for hours each week, tending to the plants so they get the right amount of moisture, sunlight, and TLC. Though Riddell has a day job as a technical writer, raising carnivorous plants is his labor of love.

“Our relationship is more like me as a high school principal,” he says. They're not his pets, and they're not family members. But they are special and important. “The plants don't listen to me, but I care for them. Then [when they're ready to be sold], they go off to people who really care about them — like students finishing school. And that matters to me.”

He rattles off interesting facts about a plethora of plants: medusa heads, with crazy green hair-like tentacles growing every which way; a habanero bonsai, that when fully grown, will sell for about $40 at a plant show; a bladderwort that blooms blue, purple, and white flowers “that look like angry rabbits.”

His Venus flytraps are generally what people associate with the carnivorous plant category. “They're the most obnoxious,” he says, pointing to a gaggle of flytraps that look distinctly smaller than they do in the cartoons. “Most other carnivorous plants are much more attractive.”

With most of his plants, insects are attracted to them by their color or scent. When creepie-crawlies land on a pitcher plant, for instance, they “get drunk on the nectar,” fall inside the trap, and are swallowed. Other carnivorous plants have sticky tentacles that reach out and grab insects as they're swarming nearby.

Riddell has found common interest with those in the Dallas-Fort Worth area who work in hydroponic shops. For those of you at home, such shops cater to those who grow plants in nutrient-rich water instead of soil. But it's often now associated hydroponic marijuana, which produces more potent pot, so they say.

While selling plants only makes Riddell about $1,500 a year, he is ramping up his business and hopes to do it full-time someday. He owns Texas Triffid Ranch -- their catch phrase: Odd Plants and Oddities for Odd People. In addition to giving lectures to kids and appearing at a handful of trade shows a year, Riddell is hoping to raise awareness about the plants. He's a member of the International Carnivorous Plant Society, which boasts 20,000 members. (This seems like a lot, and Riddell proudly agrees.)

“Raising these plants is fun, and there is a demand,” he says. “It comes down to education. In five to 10 years, everyone will be wanting some of these things.”