Sharing their love for botany with the world is what drives Doctor Christain Lass and his wife, Elanore Lass.
The Lasses are the gardeners behind one of the more unique vendors to debut at the South Cariboo Farmers Market this year: Hungry Plant Pals. From their home on Barnett Road, they’ve spent the last several years growing and cultivating a wide range of carnivorous plants. Now they seek to share them with the community while educating people about biodiversity.
“Carnivorous plants, they turn around, a little bit, the food chain as we know it. It spins the wheel, which I’ve always found pretty fascinating,” Christian said.
Christian said his love of plants began back in his native Germany from a young age, maintaining his own garden as a boy. When he went to school, he studied botany alongside biology and pharmacology before eventually pursuing a career in the pharmaceutical industry, looking at ways to use medicinal plants in modern medicine.
In 2016, Christian came to Canada to work and have an adventure, eventually getting a job at Big Bar Ranch as a gardener. It was while Big Bar was hosting a botany conference that he met his future wife and partner, Eleanore, quite by chance.
“We both like identifying plants and have herbariums, so we were a little bit nerdy in that way,” Christian recalled.
For her part, Elanore said she moved to the Cariboo in 2015 from the Okanagan and now works as a rangeland researcher ecologist for Range Ranch. Much like her husband, she’s always had a love for botany and learning the names of different plants. In university, she also studied botany, specifically what different kinds of plants can tell you about the landscapes they inhabit.
“It became this ongoing appreciation for what’s out there. With plants, you’re never done learning about them, which is the fun part of it,” Elanore remarked.
It’s little wonder then that when the couple married and settled down in 2018, their home soon became full of plants and animals. The Lasses’ home is filled with terrariums housing quail, tarantulas and isopods. In addition, they also have many plants growing on their shelves and cabinets, including a small greenhouse for their carnivorous plants.
Christian and Elanore have always been interested in carnivorous plants, but it was only after they began living together that they began to grow them. Christian said he spent a few years teaching general biology and anatomy at Thompson Rivers University in Williams Lake, where he started growing them in the lab. He would take them home, and, over time, they began to grow more and more of them.
“When you grow plants in your house, you have this little relationship with them; they’re your buddies. You can see how they react to different places in your house if they’re too cold or too warm, it’s just fun,” Elanore remarked.
Elanore said that part of their interest is the fact that the study of carnivorous plants is still a relatively new field that most people are unaware of. While many people associate them with tropical regions, she pointed out that B.C. has its own species of carnivorous plants, such as sundews and even pitcher plants.
“In Wells Grey, you can find different sundews and whatnot,” Elanore noted. “We’re learning new things all the time. With the Venus flytrap, we know it can count. It has little hairs in the mouth, and if it gets pressed twice within a certain time frame, it closes.
“Then there are other new things being found about the compounds in digestive enzymes and how different the Sarracenia (trumpet pitcher plants) have different digestive enzymes and photosynthetic methods from the different butterworts. It’s a burgeoning field.”
In their home, the Lasses grow venus fly traps, different species of pitcher plants, different species of sundews, butterworts and more. All told, they have around 15 different species, though they only sell a handful.
Christian said that in the wild, carnivorous plants typically grow in boggy areas with high levels of water, weak soil and with little nitrogen. Over generations, they’ve evolved to derive some of the nutrients they can’t get from the soil by trapping insects and small animals. Some, like venus fly traps, use hinged leaves to trap insects, others, like sundews, use sticky leaves, while pitcher plants grow leaves that fill with water and drown insects and sometimes even small rodents.
When people try to care for carnivorous plants at home, one mistake many make is potting them in regular soil. Paradoxically, this will often kill the plant as it’s not adapted for such nutrient-rich soil. Christian said he and Elanore pot their plants in sphagnum moss.
This not only mimics the low soil content of their natural environments, but also remains moist for longer, which carnivorous plants require. He also recommends using more acidic water, which would kill most other plants.
Elanore and Christian also have deliberately cultivated fruit flies in their home so their plants can naturally feed. He remarked he once had a fruit fly problem at the TRU lab, which a pitcher plant cleared right up.
As they’ve gotten better at cultivating these plants, the Lasses have begun to run out of room in their home. That’s why they decided to form Hungry Plant Pals and start selling these plants at local markets. Along with the plants, they also hand out information cards with information on the plants and how to properly care for them.
In fact, education is something that both Lasses want to make a larger part of their business. The couple are working on potentially bringing their plants to local schools to share their love of botany and nature with students.
“I worked at a nature centre in Vernon for three years as their education coordinator, and I really enjoyed that,” Elanore said. “We’re both big fans of that hands-on, nature-based education. By bringing these plants into the classrooms, we can teach units on photosynthesis, carnivorous plants, ecology and symbiosis. We both have that background and skills to bring something to the table like that.”
In the meantime, Elanore and Christian said they intend to attend more markets next year to sell their wares and spread their message. They added that anyone who wants to learn more or ask for advice on growing a carnivorous plant can follow them via social media at Hungry Plant Pals or by emailing them at hungryplantpals@gmail.com.