Palmer man grows boyhood hobby into most excellent obsession

PALMER — The landscape seems like the backdrop for a classic science fiction space adventure. Colorful foliage branching out of the soil seems uniquely beautiful — until the plant turns and, with a quick snap, eats the last of the landing party.

While such scenes are usually the product of Hollywood special effects artists, it’s easy to see how Wayne Jenski can get lost in his own warped reality that’s more science than fiction. The 30-year-old Palmer resident spends much of his free time in the basement of his 1949-era home cultivating and attending to hundreds of some of the world’s rarest carnivorous plants.

Just how many?

“Well, counting the ones in the fridge, probably a couple hundred,” Jenski said. He spent part of Saturday morning explaining the varieties of carnivorous plants in his terrariums. Because it’s winter and it’s the dormant season, some are stored in a refrigerator. “A lot of these are incredibly rare and really hard to get hold of. I don’t sell them, but I’ll sometimes trade them with friends or other growers.”

Listening to Jenski, it would be easy to assume he’s a tenured professor of botany rather than a local architect. He excitedly lists the Latin names for the variety of carnivorous plants in his collection.

There’s a nepenthes, several sarracenias and droseras, a small sci-fi forest of heliamphora and his personal favorite, cephalotus. The most recognizable carnivorous plant, a collection of various sizes of dionaea (aka Venus flytrap) are carefully stored in plastic bags in the fridge.

In layman’s terms, most carnivorous plants can be categorized in a couple of ways — pitchers, sticky-leafs, some of which are called sundews, and snap traps (like the Venus fly trap) he said. Pitchers have developed leaves that end in large bowls, or pitchers, that collect water and trap their prey (in some cases small animals), while sundews generally trap insects with sticky substances. They also will often move to envelop prey or close in on them.

Jenski’s favorite is the cephalotus, which is a unique type of pitcher plant that has tiny teeth-like ridges around the rim of its openings “because it’s just so weird,” he said.

“I don’t know why, I just have an affinity for this plant,” he said. “It’s really a weird one on so many different levels. It can close, but it closes for a different reason than trapping prey. It’s like a little stomach in there, and when it gets too dry, it closes up so it doesn’t evaporate all out.”

He also likes the plant, which resembles a purple, pink and green collection of miniature barrels with cabbage-leaf lids, because it’s so unique.

“There’s nothing related to it on the planet anymore, genetically speaking,” he said.

Then there’s the nepenthes, one of the larger pitchers in Jenski’s collection.

“This one will easily hold a can of Coke when it’s big,” he said. “Look at the teeth on that one, though. I love the look of that. It’s definitely a cool plant.”

Over the past 20 years, Jenski has nurtured his boyhood hobby into a scientific fascination. He doesn’t just collect and grow his own carnivorous plants, he also seeks them out from various areas across the United States. And he’s also gone on a carnivorous plant expedition to Venezuela with author and scientist Stewart McPherson. From that trip, he’s creating technical drawings for McPherson.

“This guy is like my hero, so to speak,” Jenski said. “He’s the one who found the world’s largest nepenthes that can easily eat rats. He finds, probably, two or three new species a year at least.”

A nepenthes, also known as a tropical pitcher plant, is the prize of Jenski’s collection. It’s clearly the largest, although compared to how big it can eventually get, he calls this one “a baby.”

“Most (carnivorous plants) eat insects, but this guy — and this one is just a baby and will hold just a couple ounces of water, by the way — will get big enough to hold three liters,” he said. “It can eat mice, it’s known to eat rats. This one I just give crickets and stuff. If you look in there, you can see the remnants in there.”

Although his nepenthes, which is indigenous to Southeast Asia, Borneo and Northern Australia, is small, “I would love to get it huge,” Jenski said. “It just requires too much space for that.”

While Jenski’s interest in carnivorous plants today is mostly scientific — he discovered them like many do in their youth — after he saw a Venus flytrap at a local store.

“You can find them everywhere,” he said. “They move really fast and that’s why people think they’re really exciting. When you’re a kid, you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s a plant that moves, it eats stuff.’ That’s just really cool, and it kind of grew from there.”

Seeing his interest, one of Jenski’s older brothers enrolled him in the International Carnivorous Plant Society as a birthday gift. Receiving the society’s newsletters expanded his world.

“There’s always something new to explore, it’s never static and there’s always new species being discovered,” he said. “Then, there are so many questions. Every time you answer a question about these plants scientifically, there’s always some other question coming up.”

One aspect that intrigues the 1999 Colony High School graduate is that it’s difficult to even pin down why some plants have evolved to be carnivorous. Typically, they grow in areas with lots of sun, lots of water and very nutrient-poor soil. While they photosynthesize food like other plants, carnivorous species “are really crappy at it,” Jenski said. Along with not being able to extract many nutrients from the soil, they seek nourishment elsewhere.

“A normal leaf on a plant is like a solar panel — flat and oriented toward the sun,” he said. “But these are so weird and are not really efficient at photosynthesizing. That’s the mystery; what’s the relationship between carnivory and being a plant?”

One terrarium holds a small garden of heliamphora, another kind of pitcher plant that has a unique way of catching prey, he said. It’s found in Venezuela, “and because it’s so wet up there, they hide their nectar under this little umbrella. They attract bees, mostly, and they land on there and it’s all bristly and there are different mechanisms that make them fall (into the pitcher). If you look straight down there, you can see they hold water and it’s basically like falling into a stomach.”

In the same large tank, a nepenthes aristolochioides is another plant Jenski singles out. It’s extremely rare in the wild and the ones owned by people like him and other collectors are typically from the same mother plant.

“This one’s probably going to be extinct (in the wild) in the next few years, sadly,” he said. “In my lifetime, I can almost guarantee that a lot of the plants in this room will be technically extinct. They might be in nerdy collections in basements, but that’s it. There’s no genetic diversity and what’s there just is not enough to sustain a population if you want to reintroduce it.”

And for those whose knowledge of carnivorous plants is limited to the Audrey II, the hungry star of the hit Broadway musical and movie “Little Shop of Horrors,” well, that’s one case of fiction being stranger than truth, he said.

“The Audrey II, mostly, I would guess, was based on a plant called an amorphophallus,” Jenski said. “And it’s not carnivorous. It’s a big, ugly flower that stinks.”

Contact Greg Johnson at greg.johnson@frontiersman.com or 352-2269.