Commentary

Of sarracenia purpurea and getting by

July 16, 2026   ·   0 Comments

By JAMES MATTHEWS

The pitcher plant’s beauty belies its nature.

But that beauty and its nature speak to something about all of us who try.

A pitcher plant’s purple-red blossom rises on a long stem to Heaven but bows toward the ground. The bulb smells floral, a little fruity, and attracts insects. Then its petals are shaped into pitchers that trap many of those insects. Spiders, bugs, and flying insects like hornets are slowly digested in the soup of rainwater, dew, digestive enzymes, and bacteria that fill them.

The pitcher plant is a predator. But it’s also more than how it appears. Indigenous people have long known about its medicinal properties. The liquid that it uses to consume prey has antiviral properties.

Imagine that.

It’s a flower full of contradiction. Fitting, then, that it’s the official provincial plant of Newfoundland and Labrador.

An aside: Before that, the Newfoundland pitcher plant was the Rock’s national symbol when it was a self-governing dominion, its own country until 1949.

Sarracenia purpurea, its Latin monicker, looks pretty scribbled on a page. Even sounds exotic off the tongue. Not a bad way to describe a carnivorous plant, I suppose.

Like the plant, the island’s beauty in landscape and seascape draws people who will soon be face-and-eyes into the economic hardship that eventually comes with living there. Many will leave. And many of those who left will return over and over again.

I took a drive earlier this month through parts of Gros Morne National Park. One of my daughters wanted to introduce her Yukon-born fiancé to the island. Show him the sights. Expose him to the weather (if you don’t like it, wait five minutes) and let him taste some of the briny breaths at the coast. So a crowd of us went to the island’s west coast, where she grew up (the island’s west is the best, in my estimation).

There’s a piece of Gros Morne called the Tablelands. It’s a stretch of mountain that looks as if it had been razed flat at the top. It’s one of the few places in the world where you can see the Earth’s mantle, that layer that’s supposed to be hundreds of kilometres below all we care about and all we dread in our daily lives.

It’s a place that looks suited well enough to be a setting in a Tolkien story. People have compared the orange-red rocks and dirt to what’s in photos of Mars. It’s half a billion years old or something. Those rusty-looking rocks are called peridotite. I must have taken that jaunt hundreds of times, but this last trip through was the first I heard that word, too. That kind of soil lacks nutrients to coax most plants to bust through the soil surface.

But the Newfoundland pitcher plant is one of the hardiest plants. It flourishes in bogs amongst the patches of bakeapples and the cold muck that sucks boots from feet. If it could, it would strut with confidence down the road. It’s assertive. It’s undaunted. It grows on the Tablelands’ slope.

This last trip home, I was close enough to smell for the first time a Newfoundland pitcher plant. To look inside its leafy pitchers. There was a piece of ground where I saw a tiny one growing from the tight space between those orange-red rocks around it, and in dirt that shouldn’t be called soil. But it eked through.

That speaks of character. People are like that, too. Many people are like that, a little bit of a plant shoving itself between rocks, weathering stones, coming up through tough circumstances.

Like that plant I saw growing through hardship, people get through interpersonal differences, financial droughts and economic realities, addictions and doubts, and emotional crises.

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