Drosera I and II, 2019, photographs taken of 19th-century microscope slides, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, 152.5 × 122 cm / 60 × 48 inches each

“I care more about Drosera than the origin of species. It is a wonderful plant, or rather a most sagacious animal. I will stick up for Drosera to the day of my death.” Thus wrote Charles Darwin to his friend Asa Gray in 1860, soon after observing sundews in an English marsh. What captivated him was their peculiar adaptability. In low-nitrogen environments, Drosera secures the nitrogen essential to growth by capturing insects. The study of Drosera and other carnivorous plants helped advance evolutionary thinking while exposing the limits of rigid taxonomic habits and inherited dogmas about what plants are.

Drosera is not a blind patch of glue. It senses when something touches it repeatedly or lingers, and only then closes the trap, waiting just long enough to be sure. Once it does, it releases digestive fluids that break down the prey, and the leaf reclaims the freed nutrients. Its tentacles move slowly but deliberately, an energetically costly effort that pays off in harsh, nutrient-poor habitats where every atom of nitrogen and phosphorus counts. To spare its pollinators, many species lift their flowers well above the sticky leaves, keeping these pollinators out of harm’s way. The plant’s viscous mucilage can also host microbes that assist with digestion, making nutrient recovery more efficient. The system is flexible. Depending on local conditions, the plant adjusts how many traps it builds, how sticky they are, and how quickly they respond, fine-tuning its performance to the world around it.

These capacities have also opened a path toward philosopher Michael Marder’s notion of plant thinking. The leaf that becomes a trap, the specialized movements, and the context-sensitive responses invite us to probe the paradoxes of assumed human exceptionalism. Plant thinking does not claim humanlike consciousness for plants; rather, it extends the idea of capacity from the human into the non-human world, challenges the belief that thought is exclusively ours, and encourages a more inclusive account of thinking across the living world.

Drosera I, 2019, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, detail

Drosera II, 2019, archival pigment prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta paper, detail