Whispering Pitchers

Written and Photographed by Hailey Nelms

I’ve been an avid goer to Stanley Rehder’s Carnivorous Plant Garden for about three years now, and I do mean avid. There was a time in 2022 where I’d go three times a day to just listen, to cry, to reground my inner self, or just because I didn’t know what else to do during a break up. I taught myself how to use my camera there. I learned how close I can get to a subject with different lighting and still keep a crazy bokeh. I became who I am, more than just artistically (for the most part) because of that garden.

I don’t deny that I am a bit too infatuated with the Carnivorous plants, but they’ve listened to me and my issues many times, I can’t help but hear them and their issues now. Every time I took a photo of a cluster of Pitcher plants a few years ago, they were laughing but now they just whisper fearful thoughts – for the maples invading their preserve. Maple trees with long, robust roots that go under the Pitcher’s rhizomes and eventually ‘choke out’ the species specially transplanted to be there.

It’s nobody’s fault, but it does take a village to fix it. I had the privilege and availability to be a part of a team, led by the Coastal Land Trust, in the late spring/early summer that took a day to do our best to gently excavate the invading maples. We did a pretty fine job, some even hacked out bits of Poison Ivy. Getting ready for the annual Flytrap Frolic, every first weekend of June. Proud we were. Flashforeward, two – three months from then, I went back for funsies and found more maples had either stuck around or come back, larger. I could hear their fight, I could hear the Pitcher Plants standing up for not just themselves but the others, like the Sundews and Flytraps – that are significantly smaller but still inhabit the garden.

Call me crazy for claiming to hear them, but if you spend enough time in nature, actually in the space of something more than just your being – overtime you’ll hear the whispers too. I don’t think it’s acknowledged these days, but who am I? Just the girl who claims she can hear the Pitcher Plants whispering among themselves.