Learn about the various species and hybrids, their pitcher shapes, and the clever strategies they employ to attract and capture their prey. In this Golden Rules video, Nigel Hewitt-Cooper of Hewitt-Cooper Carnivorous Plants reveals his three top tips on the temperature, water and light that carnivorous plants need to thrive.

You will need small plastic bags like this or snack size ziploc bags for refrigerator stratification. Hampshire Carnivorous Plants: Matt Soper offers one of the widest ranges of carnivorous plants in the UK. If you’d like to dive deeper into the 170+ species or calculate the requirements of a specific plant, I’d suggest bookmarking my Nepenthes Interactive Guide. It has attractive red and yellow speckled pitchers, and is a particularly good candidate for a houseplant.They like full sun, a south facing window, but benefit from cooler periods during dormancy in winter, so move plants somewhere cooler. Growlands Premium Carnivorous Plant Soil / Carnivorous Plant Compost is produced in the UK using Irish peat sourced from areas of no scientific interest and washed-graded perlite. Dormancy: Venus flytraps and all North American pitcher plants require a cold winter dormancy between November and February, while Cape Sundews can grow year-round. The RHS collaborates with industry and specialist growers, of which some have demonstrated long-term (30 years) consistent results growing carnivorous plants without peat. After all, finding the right balance of micro and macro-nutrients that individual plants need can be tricky, that’s why here at Growlands we’ve done the hard work for you.

To keep plants looking their best, you can remove old pitchers, traps, flower heads and leaves once they start to fade. ICPS Facebook forum -- The forum is essentially inactive but the information from old posts is invaluable. Their tiny traps grow up to one centimetre in length and capture prey including mosquito larvae, small fish and tadpoles. Alternatively, many growers have good success adding liquid orchid fertilisers (such as Orchid Focus) to the pitchers.

In the wild, hardy carnivorous plants grow in boggy ground, so their compost needs to be moist at all times during the warmer months. Most carnivorous plants are perennials, so will live for several years if given the correct care and conditions. A prey's proximity to the trap entrance triggers a valve trapdoor to open into a hollow bladder, creating suction that then flushes the prey inside. Found almost everywhere on Earth, Bladderworts capture prey using bladder-like organs on their roots, which are submerged underwater. Plants growing outside, especially those in containers, may need regular watering in summer and in long dry spells.

The slender, green traps have red veining that becomes more conspicuous on the underside of the coppery-brown hoods that gave rise to its common name: the copper top pitcher plant. Common butterwort ( Pinguicula vulgaris) grows throughout the UK on bogs, fens, wet heaths and moors.Disguised as safe and delicious root structures, snare traps specialise in capturing single-celled organisms such as protozoans and ciliates, which they attract through chemicals.