Sarracenia spp. Trumpet Pitcher

It's understandable that people admire Sarracenia plants for their funnel-shaped pitfall traps that catch and drown insects but in many ways their flowers are equally remarkable..... and their purpose is to lure insects for pollination rather than as a food source, so this is a Jekyll-and-Hyde plant. Each flower consists of five sepals that expand as the bud opens, arching downwards above the rest of the floral structure.

Below hang five petals, shaped like tongues, protruding from gaps in the weird, inverted umbrella-shaped stigma that is suspended from a style in the centre of the flower that leads to the ovary and ovules (hidden from view in these photographs). There's a very fine cutaway illustration here that identifies all the key structures. Bees crawl along the petal and in through those curved indentations that you can see around the edge of the 'inverted umbrella'. Once inside they collect pollen or deliver it to the tips of one of the five receptive stigmas that are at the apex of each of the upwards curving, greenish bands of thickening visible between the petals. It can be quite a struggle for the bees to force their way in and out again.

When they are in full flower the blooms have a scent that's reminiscent of a bed of stinging nettles on a hot summer's day, although in the green-flowered species above (Sarracenia flava) it smells of cat urine - which must be attractive to bees but makes this plant unsuitable for growing on your kitchen windowsill.

The flowers appear in spring, before a new crop of pitchers is produced, and in the bud stage they're reminiscent of a rather elegant art deco lamp. The flowers are a nectar source for bees but the pitchers are also a potential death trap, so the blooms are elevated in long stems well above the deadly pitchers. The scent of the flowers seems to be a powerful attractant to bees - if I leave my conservatory doors open during the flowering period, in early spring, the room soon fills with eager bumblebees, newly emerged from hibernation and desperate to get at the flowers.

Sarracenia species are native to North America. Some species are hardy (although the winter we've just had will have put that statement to the test) and S.purpurea is naturalised in the wild in Ireland and in the Lake District.

For more information about carnivorous plants take a look at  http://www.thecps.org.uk/

Sesame, Sesamum indicum

Sesame Sesame indicum is reminiscent of a small white foxglove and is an easy plant to grow from the culinary sesame seeds that you can buy in the supermarket. Some say that it is the most ancient of all the oil crops and evidence from the Middle East suggests that it has been cultivated there for over 4000 years, prized for its nutty oil whose flavour becomes more intense when the seeds are roasted - which is why it's used to garnish loaves before baking. The oil can constitute up to 60 per cent of the weight of the seed. The crop probably spread from Africa to the Middle East and then throughout Asia. Today India is a major producer but you can raise your own crop in a greenhouse, conservatory or on a sunny windowsill by sowing a few seeds. They'll begin to ripen seed pods in about 10-12 weeks from sowing. 

Arisaema triphyllum, Jack-in-the-Pulpit, Araceae

Arisaema species are relatives of our native British wild arum or cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum), but are somewhat more elegant, with their curved, candy-striped spathe. They thrive in semi-shaded woodland conditions but I've often found that it's very easy to forget where you planted them and accidentally dig them up, so in recent years I've taken to planting them in pots, where their corms slowly increase by producing offsets. This species comes from North America, so should be very hardy - and I'm hoping that it will have survived the current unusually cold winter. 

If you take a look here you can see some of the other species that are in cultivation - and also see why they are considered to be highly collectable plants. Unlike many aroids they don't have a strong smell - just a rather elegant floral architecture.

Voodoo Lily Dracunculus vulgaris

Once smelled, never forgotten: the voodoo lily Dracunculus vulgaris has one of the most eye-wateringly awful aromas of any plant. It grows wild on stony hillsides in Greece and Crete, where the stench of its flowers - reminiscent of a decaying sheep carcass, drifts long distances and attracts fly pollinators. It belongs to a group of plants that are known as sapromyophilous flowers, which means that their flowers emit the scent of decay and attract flies. It sprouts from a corm and I've grown it twice. On the first occasion I left it on the living room windowsill for a couple of days while we went away for the weekend and it took us two weeks to get the pong out of the curtains and carpets. On the second occasion, a couple of years ago, I grew the specimen in the photo and planted it outside in the garden just as it was about to open its rather spooky inflorescence. I suspect that the neighbours much have wondered whether something had gone catastrophically amiss with their drains. It's one of those botanical curiosities that you just have to grow once - or if you are a real masochist twice - but that'll do. If you wanted to be really mean and had a tendency towards botanical practical jokes you could send an unlabelled corm to an acquiantance with instructions to grow it indoors. They'll love you for it. There's also another plant marketed under the name voodoo lily, Sauromatum venosum, which has a similar stench but has purple spots on the hood-like spathe and a much longer tongue-like spadix.

Skunk Cabbage Lysichiton americanus

As spring approaches, what plants spring to mind? Snowdrops? Primroses? Daffodils? If you lived in the Pacific Northwest of America your list might also include the imposing skunk cabbage Lysichiton americanus. 

Another skunk cabbage species, Symplocarpus foetidus, is a  thermogenic plant, emitting enough heat from that central club-shaped spadix to melt surrounding snow , although L.americanus isn't thermogenic.  If you take a look at http://5e.plantphys.net/article.php?ch=&id=503 you can see a thermal image of another aroid, Philodendron flower, a relative of skunk cabbage, showing how the central spadix generates heat. 

L. americanus has a slightly unpleasant smell that attracts beetle pollinators in its native habitat. This certainly works here in England too, half a world away from home - the skunk cabbage in my bog garden attracts pollinators , although here its flies rather than beetles that are attracted to its aroma. 

The flower buds on the plant in my garden are just beginning to elongate and will be fully open in two or three weeks. After they wither they're replaced by very large waxy green leaves which were once used as the botanical equivalent of waxed wrapping paper. The climate in the UK suits this plant well and I know of one local woodland close to the River Wear where a colony has been thriving in a swampy hollow between the trees for almost two decades - almost certainly a garden throw-out that has been swept down river and established itself in the wild.

Safflower Carthamnus tinctorius

Safflower Carthamnus tinctorius is a very ancient crop plant, cultivated at least since the time of the ancient Egyptians. The orange florets have been found sown into garlands of papyrus and cloth wrapped around the necks of mummies (including that of Tutankahmun) dated as early as 1600BC. Later the Egyptians learned to extract the dye from red- and orange-flowered varieties and used it to dye cloth, and together with indigo it remained an important dye up until the development of modern synthetic substitutes. The valuable edible oil content of safflower seed was probably discovered by the Romans. The crop has been cultivated for its oil in India for hundreds of years and by the end of the 19th. century it began to be grown elsewhere - including the United States - as a source of oil. A field crop of safflower in full bloom must be quite a sight. It develops deep roots quickly, so grows well on the falling water table in summer in Mediterranean climates and is relatively drought-tolerant. It produces two kinds of oil - polyunsaturates for soft margerines and salad oils and mono-unsaturates used for frying. More recently, ornamental varieties have been bred, not least because the florets retain their colour well when the flowers are dried - something that the ancient Egyptians discovered. The plant in the picture arrived in wild bird seed that I put out for birds in winter, and came up in the garden as a self-sown seedling.

Columbine, Aquilegia vulgaris

This photo shows rather nicely why Aquilegia species are commonly known as columbines. The name columbine comes from columba, the Latin word for dove, and it doesn’t take too much imagination to see a circle of five elegant, long-necked doves here, heads bowed, wings outstretched. Aquilegia vulgaris has been grown in gardens since the 13th. century, when it first appears in illuminated manuscripts, and most Aquilegia species are easy to cultivate. Columbines are plants that you usually only need to introduce into a garden once because they set large numbers of seed that germinate freely, with self-sown seedlings appearing all over the garden. There are at least seventy species of Aquilegia, including Britain’s native Aquilegia vulgaris, and when grown together most can form hybrids, producing a bewildering range of horticultural hybrid varieties of uncertain parentage that go under the general name of Aquilegia x hybrida. Long-spurred hybrids are derived from crosses with A. caerulea , introduced into British gardens from the Rocky Mountains in the 1860s, and hybrids with A. chrysantha from Arizona have widened the range of colours available. If you want to grow the true species, most of which are short-lived perennials, you need to take positive steps to prevent cross pollination, otherwise you end up with a garden full of hybrid seedlings.