I’m just back from a few days with family in Sebastapol, up in the Russian River and Sonoma Valley wine country north of San Francisco. I’ll post on the garden destinations I managed to drag people to while we were up there, but I’ll start backwards with one of the events on the way home yesterday.

On the return trip the car was plagued for a few minutes by this fly that kept buzzing around the inside of the car, evading all our attempts to shoo it out the windows. In the back seat we had three plants that were my souvenirs from a visit to California Carnivores, a carnivorous plant specialty nursery that was just five minutes form the hotel where we stayed. (I’ll post more on the nursery visit later.)

One of the plants was this sundew, Drosera filiformis ssp. filiformis ‘Florida Giant.’ Well, I think you know where this story is headed…

When we got home John noticed that a fly had been trapped by the sundew, most likely the one that had been annoying us at the beginning of the trip. That explains why we hadn’t noticed the insect after the first few minutes of the return trip.

After this experience I’d like to suggest that every automotive manufacturer should make a drosera standard equipment on all their models, especially for this buggy time of the year…