Lessons from the Pitcher Plant

This past summer, I came face-to-face with a pitcher plant for the first time. Of course, I’d encountered sarracenia purpurea many times before; it’s a familiar feature of our provincial landscape. But because it only grows on bogs, marshes, and fens, I’m used to seeing it from a safe distance, trudging over a spruce-planked boardwalk to cross a wetland. 

On this special occasion, I was making my way to the punch bowl, my favourite swimming hole in St. John’s, located just off Blackhead Road in Shea Heights. When I arrived at the midway point of the trail, I noticed a large constellation of pitcher plants on the left side of the path. I’d never seen so many clusters of those deep red blooms in one place, and I’d know those floating tell-tale silhouettes anywhere. 

Spotting a plant near the trail’s perimeter, I seized the opportunity to get closer. It was an enormous one too, with eight blooms at least. I tiptoed as gingerly as I could onto the spongy carpet of sphagnum moss. I crouched down and inspected its waxy-petaled flowers at eye level and leaned in to smell them. I was surprised to find they offered pleasant citrus notes, like some otherworldly orange blossom. I later learned they produce this scent to attract pollinators. Not only that, they hold their blooms up high on the stem so bees won’t succumb to their treacherous pools below. 

The cup-shaped leaves grow so close to the ground, it’s easy to miss them. They are light green with purple-veins; they stick out from the grass like ears peeking through hair. These ones weren’t fully opened yet–too early in the season–but I could still see the liquid glimmering within. All of a sudden the air grew thick with mosquitos; they wouldn’t let me linger. I quickly returned to the trail with waterlogged feet.

It was early July then, and I’d already been thinking about the pitcher plant for at least a month—in particular, its enduring status as a cultural symbol. It’s the star of our current provincial brand signature, after all, and it has a longstanding association with Newfoundland and Labrador. Justin Brake’s piece on the Ode to Newfoundland last year had me thinking about our province’s cultural lexicon. If traditions are how we maintain cultural values over time, he wondered, what values, ideas, and relationships are we bringing back to life each time we lend our voices to the national anthem? 

In the end, he concluded, no matter how beautiful those lyrics are, or what feelings we bring to them, they are still the words of a fair weather Englishman. Sir Cavendish Boyle may have liked the look of Newfoundland and said some nice things about her, but she was never more than a colonial asset in his eyes. (Nevermind that he didn’t give Labrador the time of day). 

The point is, if we’re using symbols to represent Newfoundland and Labrador, we should know where they come from and what they mean–and make sure they align with who we are and who we want to be. 

When I moved home after so many years living away, I readily admitted that my sense of home was rooted more in an idea than a real place. I’ve been working on changing that by getting to know our province. After my uncomfortably close encounter with the pitcher plant this summer, I figured it was high time to get to know our provincial flower better too. 

“Unusual in form and sinister in habit”

As iconic as those colour-saturated Newfoundland and Labrador tourism commercials are, they’d be incomplete without their signature sign-off. I don’t mean the one that says, “Call Seamus,” or “Maggie” or “Joan.” I mean the salute from the pitcher plant. In the ending bumper of these advertisements, the plant can be seen looming over our provincial wordmark, its nodding blossoms billowing in the digital breeze. They almost look like they’re waving, beckoning visitors to come here, come home. 

The pitcher plant is seductive like that. Much like our province, it too relies on visitors to sustain its livelihood, and deploys creative tactics to reel those visitors in. After all, I took the bait three years ago, returning from the mainland after 15 years away. Sometimes I’m glad I came back. Other times, I wonder if I’m as doomed as the fruit fly who came looking for nectar but found a pitfall trap instead. 

The purple pitcher plant, sometimes called the northern pitcher plant, has been part of Newfoundland and Labrador’s official brand signature since 2006. This empress of the bog is meant to reflect “who we are and what we stand for,” and to ensure that “the world will recognize us and know us,” according to the province’s messaging.  

“Meat-eating plant the new ‘face’ of Newfoundland,” the Globe and Mail announced after the logo was first unveiled.  To be sure, a carnivorous plant is a provocative choice for a face and a provincial symbol–but it’s a complicated one too.  

What exactly does it mean that we align ourselves with a plant that is described as “unusual in form and sinister in habit”? 

The plant’s contrary feeding habits are no secret–we’ve written about them before. And yet, whatever they have to say about this land and its people remains ambiguous–at least to my mind.

In his speaking notes at the original brand launch, then premier Danny Williams was careful not to dwell on the plant’s unusual appetite. Of course, it’s also downplayed in the logo itself, which depicts only the blossoms, or the plant’s “better” half. Its trademark pitchers, meanwhile—those life-sustaining lower leaves—are nowhere to be seen.

The plant’s carnivorous nature is shrouded in euphemisms, articulated in vague innuendo as some kind of creative adaptation, an indicator of its resilience, treated as though it were nothing more than some endearing quirk. “Oh you know, that’s just sarracenia, don’t mind her!”  

It’s as if to pause too long on it, we might have to admit that we’re comparing our province to a plant that, for all its striking beauty, is a death pool playing a ruthless game of bait-and-switch. 

As one concerned citizen observed as early as 1920, “depending on the attitude of mind, one may get a lesson from the pitcher plant to remind him of how even the outwardly beautiful things may have a depraved constitution. Fancy the treachery of the inviting cup which is held open to entrap unwary flies… It offers shelter only that it may poison the trusting guest.”

Indeed, if we take the analogy to its conclusion, we risk framing Newfoundland and Labrador as a place where a few pollinating bees at the top come and go as they please, taking as much as they need. They are the capital investors who will sustain us for another season. The rest of us, meanwhile, will just languish below in this soil-starved energy superbasin, slowly being eaten alive. 

“Our people are our greatest natural resource,” Williams said, after all, as he stood alongside the province’s beguiling new brand. But with our aging population, low birth rates, and high rates of outmigration, Newfoundland and Labrador is teetering on the edge of a demographic cliff. Our “greatest natural resource” is dwindling. If we’re going to make it, we need all the people we can get.

A complicated symbol

Of course, suggesting that the province is running some sort of Little Shop of Horrors Feed-Me-Seymour scheme is not what officials had in mind when they summoned the pitcher plant as our official brand.

It was the plant’s successes they wanted to foreground–not the processes by which they were achieved. Williams lauded the plant’s insistence on living in a place where it wasn’t supposed to be, not only managing to survive here, but actually devising a way to thrive. He took care to celebrate the plant’s resilience, its tenacity, and its creativity. These were the qualities of the pitcher plant, he insisted, that made it “the essence of Newfoundland and Labrador,” and “a true symbol of who we are, as a people and as a place.”

Yet, 50 years earlier, Joey Smallwood, our very first premier, interpreted the pitcher plant in a very different way. 

In 1954, when it was discussed in the legislature as the province’s new floral emblem, Smallwood remarked that because the plant sustains itself by baiting and catching local insects, it was “a perfect piece of symbolism of the mercantile system.” 

Mercantilism was, of course, the nationalist economic policy that tied the Colony of Newfoundland to England. As a framework, it ensured that the colony existed solely for the economic benefit of the Mother Country, which could draw raw materials from its colonial possessions, and use them to accumulate wealth, using restrictive, one-sided, monopolistic trade.

Smallwood got more specific in The Evening Telegram: “The pitcher plant, with its lone stem bearing flower, surrounded by fly traps represented Water St. [a street historically associated with merchants in St. John’s] The unwary fly, attracted by the sweet liquid in the cup-shaped leaves, approached and cast its vote […] got into the pitcher, but once in, there was no way out. Water Street had the unsuspecting creature in its grasp.” 

This interpretation of the pitcher plant as an economic system was supported by then Minister of Provincial Affairs Miles Murray, too. He told the speaker of the House of Assembly at the time, that because the plant is “predaceous, and can devour a fly hovering over it […] it could be symbolic of our economic history.” 

Murray was the one who nominated the pitcher plant in the first place, on behalf of the Newfoundland Historical Society. It was all part of keeping with colonial tradition. The other commonwealth nations embraced the heraldic practice of using floral emblems. England had its rose, Ireland its Shamrock, and Scotland its heather, and so on. It was important for Newfoundland and Labrador to follow suit and fit in.

A perennial preoccupation

While Newfoundland and Labrador’s relationship with the pitcher plant was made official only recently, the two have been courting each other for quite some time, well before it was named the provincial floral emblem. 

The province has been associated with a wide array of symbols over the years–40 according to one count–but the pitcher plant has maintained a perennial place in our cultural lexicon for over three centuries.

In fact, our public officials have insisted on it.  

It first appeared in the fledgling national imagination in 1864 when it was engraved on the flipside of the newly-minted Newfoundland penny, where it remained until 1947. It re-emerged again as the province’s official floral emblem in 1954. In 1966, it did a letter mail tour, appearing on Canadian five-cent stamps as part of a series on provincial flowers.  

From colonialism to confederation to the cod moratorium and beyond, the purple pitcher plant has been consistently summoned as an emblem of this region (including on the islands of St. Pierre et Miquelon, at least on one occasion).

It’s hardly a surprise that after extensive consultations, this same plant was readily integrated into the province’s exclusive brand signature. Now, the three-bloom pitcher plant appears on all of Newfoundland and Labrador’s provincial communications. 

This hopscotch of pitcher plant “moments”–1864, 1954, 1966, and 2006–is not insignificant. These dates loosely correlate with key periods in Newfoundland and Labrador’s recent settler history. 

The first coincides with the establishment of a responsible government. The second with Newfoundland’s confederation with Canada. The third, with the expansion of Newfoundland’s Trans-Canada Highway and the beginnings of its fulsome provincial tourism strategy. The fourth, with the province’s post-moratorium arrival into the millennium. 

Coincidence or not, during major transitional periods public officials have demonstrated a pattern of summoning the pitcher plant to articulate Newfoundland and Labrador’s national identity: to ourselves, to Canada, and to the rest of the world. 

In order to understand why it took root in the national imagination, let’s look back at who first planted it.

Her Majesty’s pitcher plant

I always thought Newfoundland and Labrador’s obsession with the purple pitcher plant had something to do with it simply being unique to the province. We might be better known for our rocky coastal cliffs, but we have our fair share of wetlands too—and the purple pitcher plant is a recurring character in them.  

But the truth is, while it is native to the province, it’s not exclusive to it. In fact, the purple pitcher plant is one of the more prolific North American pitcher plants; it grows right across the continent. 

If it’s prolific everywhere, how exactly did the purple pitcher plant come to be associated specifically with Newfoundland and Labrador?

It’s popularly attributed to Queen Victoria. She is the one who is repeatedly credited for selecting it to appear on the Newfoundland one-cent coin, though there is no evidence to substantiate this claim. Some have even questioned whether the flowers even belong to the pitcher plant at all. As one resident pointed out, in a strongly worded letter to the editor of The St. John’s Daily Star in 1920, the flowers are in the shape of a wreath, and anyone familiar with the plant would know that it “does not lend itself very well to braiding.” 

Regardless of what it was, people saw a pitcher plant. Like a Rorschach test, it was the interpretation that mattered and prevailed. So too did the majestic mythology of its origins; no doubt, having the Queen vouch for the flower grants it a certain level of acceptability (not unlike our provincial penitentiary).  

So, if Queen Victoria didn’t put the pitcher plant on our coin, who did? More research is needed. For now, I wager it was some monarchy-serving Englishman leaning into the cultural zeitgeist. Because in 1864, the year the pitcher plant was engraved on the Newfoundland penny, the global botanical exchange was well underway. British colonial expansion was increasing, as were England’s encounters with new people, their lands, and the flora and fauna, too. 

Plant specimens were brought back to Europe from the “new world” by horticulturalists and botanists at the time, placed in British Botanical gardens, or offered up as tributes, displayed as trophies, or used as objects of study. (In an ironic twist, purple pitcher plants have since become invasive in England and Ireland, with efforts being made to remove them for displacing native plants.). 

This growing collection of plants wasn’t just of scientific, economic, and political interest, but of cultural interest too. Dictionaries devoted to the language of plants began to appear, positioning flowers as carriers of meaning, capable of communicating what could not be said in conservative Victorian society. Meanwhile, scientists and writers were exploring what plants could tell us about the meaning of life, and the nature and organization of the world. 

Oppositional vegetation in need of conquering

For a long time, botany was one of the few subjects considered suitable for women to study because plants were associated with normative feminine qualities like beauty, passivity, fragility, and softness. By the 19th century, plants were becoming an intense object of interest for male writers, artists, scientists and politicians alike. No doubt, this was also aided by the growing financial importance of plants to imperial wealth and power. Without crops like sugarcane and cotton and the enslaved labour to cultivate them, Empires wouldn’t have had much of a foundation to rest on.  

But carnivorous plants played a role in this too, recasting plants as masculine and aligning them with characteristics of a worthy rival: self-interested, cunning, active, and athletic. English botanist Sir Joseph Hooker went as far to describe carnivorous plants as “vegetable sportsmen.” Elsewhere they were framed as enchanting floral femme fatales. Either way, the “murderous propensities” of insectivorous plants generated immense European interest. In 1875, Charles Darwin devoted a whole book to the topic. 

Carnivorous plants like sarracenia purpurea helped change European understandings about the differences between plants and animals at a time when industrialization and colonial expansion were making the world strange, unpredictable, and hostile. 

It makes a certain sense that they would become objects of morbid curiosity in literature as Victorians were venturing into unknown territories, turning up as popular plot points in gothic horror novels, appearing in pulp and science fiction stories about man-eating trees and murderous orchids. 

It’s easy to see how England, a country that had for so long aligned itself with the beautiful and barbed rose, might be excited by the idea of predatory, carnivorous plants, of oppositional vegetation that needed to be conquered, at a time when its own imperial appetite for land and resources was growing.  

Perhaps believing that plants, too, were subject to the same so-called “law of tooth and claw” as animals emboldened the British imagination in their intrusive exploits, and helped naturalize their destructive urge to take and feed on everything in their sight.

Sowing, planting, cultivating colonies

Britain had long relied on plants and planting metaphors to articulate and naturalize its colonial activities, nowhere better articulated than right here in this province. While early settlements in Newfoundland and Labrador were established through plantations, the discourse of planting even predates this.  

In 1578, Sir Humphrey Gilbert arrived on the island for a Queen’s errand, “to plant a colony in North America.” In the words of Edward Hayes in Sir Humphrey Gilbert’s Voyage to Newfoundland, “the seed of Christian religion had been sowed amongst those pagans, which by this time might have brought forth a most plentiful harvest and copious congregation of Christians.” Then, in 1609, John Guy put forward a proposal “to animate the English to plant in Newfoundland.” And so they did, sending planters to sow seeds, establish roots, and cultivate plantations to feed and strengthen a mercantile economy. 

Centuries later, Reverend Moses Harvey, who lived in Newfoundland at the time, likened our waters to “nurseries” for English seamen in his 1863 book, Newfoundland, The Oldest British Colony. He meant it as a place where young plants are stored while they wait to be planted. What’s more, Harvey mentions the pitcher plant in his chapter devoted to the island’s “Vegetal Kingdom.” However, it appears pretty late in his list of notable plants. Aside from describing the pitcher plant as “one of the most remarkable productions of the swampy ground,” he makes very little of its significance to the people or the place.  

That’s hardly a smoking gun, but given that it was published a year before the appearance of the Newfoundland penny, I’d expect the pitcher plant to figure in Harvey’s book more than it does. This adds to my hypothesis that the pitcher plant’s placement in Newfoundland and Labrador’s cultural lexicon didn’t come directly from the land itself, or even the settler’s experience of it; it was more than likely a colonial inclination.

That first appearance on the penny, after all, took the form of a wreath circling the crown, as if for emphasis. In fact, the pitcher plant continues to figure in places where the monarchy has left its mark; in 1975 it appeared on Royal Albert’s English bone china as part of the provincial flowers series. It endures on the shoulder flash of the Royal Newfoundland Constabulary. It also gives shape to the insignia of the Governor General’s Order of Newfoundland. Meanwhile, it’s been included in the logo of the Royal Newfoundland Yacht Club since “royal” was added to the club’s name in 1989. These “royal” appearances suggest that the plant’s persistence as a symbol is a colonial inheritance, a bid for colonial acceptability. 

So we’ve inherited the symbol of the pitcher plant from the monarchy. In reproducing it without explanation, and without a lived relation to the plant, we’ve also inherited the European understanding of the pitcher plant, too, in all of its predatory, carnivorous glory. 

For when the pitcher plant appears in our national imagination, it is often as an object without context, relation, or depth. Abstracted from its material reality, and the land to which it belongs, the pitcher plant can easily be made to mean whatever it is we want it or need it to mean.

But the pitcher plant is more than a symbol, it’s also a living plant. The province’s messaging admits as much, but it doesn’t delve deeply enough into how the pitcher plant really lives in relation to what’s around it. 

It isn’t just an individual plant in the landscape, a unique icon in the wetland ecosystem; the pitcher plant also creates an ecosystem of its very own. 

The queen of cups

The pitcher plant is known by many names, many of which highlight the plant’s unique form: Turtle Socks, Side-Saddle Flower, Dumb-Watch, Frog’s Britches, Frog’s Pants, and Whippoorwill-boots. 

But other names hint at the existence of deeper, more meaningful relationships with the plant: Adam’s Pitcher, Forefathers’s Cup, Huntsman’s Cup, Indian Cup, Indian Dipper, and Indian Tea Kettle, Fever Cup, and Smallpox Plant. These names single out the plant’s leaves and the liquid they hold inside, mentioning nothing of the flowers, suggesting a different set of relationships that precede European arrival.   

When he was on the island in 1822, William Cormack described the plant in his diaries as “Indian cup,” noting that it is “used by the Mi’Kmaq (and Beothuk) for ailments of the lungs.” A few decades later in 1861, an H. Clift from Harbour Grace wrote a letter to The Evening Telegram stating, “certain Lieut. Hardy, of the Royal Artillery, showed that Surgeon Logan had cured eleven men of a regiment there of by the use of this root, or rather a due decoction thereof. The information of this virtue was originally obtained from an old woman of the Shawnee tribe.” 

This detail suggests that for Indigenous Peoples living elsewhere on Turtle Island who actually had a more intimate relationship with sarracenia, the purple pitcher plant was no predator–it was medicine. From the looks of it, this knowledge was taken from Indigenous Peoples, entertained for a while, then eventually abandoned. 

There is now scientific evidence that proves that the combination of dew, rainwater, and digestive enzymes in the plant’s pitchers has antiviral properties, and does in fact work against pox and herpes. 

This presents an occasion to think about the pitcher plant as more than an opportunistic predator: it’s a remedy in an ailing time.

 We won’t find the gift of the pitcher plant in its flowers, as beautiful and striking as they are. We’ll only find it in the waters it holds below. 

Curiously, the pitcher plant is said to mean “hospitality” in The Catholic Language of Plants (1861), published by the Young Ladies of Gumley House (a convent in London): 

Amid the wilds of America, the Pitcher-plant extends its broad, boat-shaped leaves, to receive the rains and dews of heaven. Its flowers can boast but little beauty, yet it is unspeakably precious to the wanderer; for in its’ hollowed leaves, he finds the cooling draught that will refresh him, and give him strength to pursue his toilsome way.

There is a good chance that the book’s contents were compiled before the plant’s carnivorous nature became widely known, but nonetheless it provides a welcome clue, not only to the medicinal nature of the pitcher plant, but the hospitality it in fact provides. 

As Newfoundland and Labrador undergoes another significant transitional period–including a housing crisis no less–it’s time to get reacquainted with the pitcher plant and what it can teach us about community-building and home-making on this newly-found, but long-inhabited land. 

Collaboration, not carnivory

We all know the pitcher plant is carnivorous, but it’s not as straightforward as that. Pitcher plants do get energy from photosynthesis like any other green plant, they just don’t get nutrients or water from the soil. They grow in areas that lack the oxygen they need to draw nutrients up through their roots. The water in the ground isn’t available for uptake either, so they rely on precipitation for hydration. In order to live in such nutrient-poor, highly acidic environments they’ve learned to supplement their diet with insects.

Once they’ve properly flowered and the pollinators have come and gone, those tube-shaped pitchers open up and collect rain and dew. They emit sweet scents to lure insects their way, while also glowing under ultraviolet light. The edges of the leaves are slippery. Any visitors that loiter too long here will inevitably succumb. Downward pointing hairs facilitate their descent, while the liquid solution ensures they’ll sink; there’s no surface tension here. After catching their prey, the process of digestion begins.

The thing is, while pitcher plants can digest and metabolize insects, they have no way to excrete waste. Metabolites and remnants accumulate, and the liquid in the traps weakens over time. As a result, when the plants mature, they aren’t able to do all the digestion properly—at least, not on their own. They need help, and they get that help from other organisms.

The liquid inside the pitchers, as it turns out, doesn’t just contain rainwater and enzymes; it also hosts a diversity of life. It contains symbiotic dipteran larvae, algae, bacteria, mites, fungi, and protists, from rotifers and flesh-flies to mosquitoes. Pitcher plants across North America can have almost 100 other species inside them. Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, one plant might host up to 40 different kinds, including their own brand of locals: pitcher plant fly, the pitcher plant midge, the pitcher plant mosquito, and eastern flesh fly, among others.  

These life forms do not so much live in competition with one another, nor are they parasitic. They live in mutually beneficial relation to each other, where what is good for one, is good for all. Once newcomers, these organisms have adapted to live in this particular ecological pocket, producing anti-enzymes to avoid being digested by the plant themselves. They use the pitcher plant as an oasis to eat, drink, shelter, and reproduce. What one organism eats and excretes will get broken down by another, so that the pitcher plant itself is finally able to absorb the nutrients it needs.  

Essentially, these organisms have integrated into the plant’s lifestyle, while maintaining a distinct individuality of their own. These gatherings are called “inquiline communities” — groups made up of organisms who make their homes in the homes of others. 

Like subletters, tenants, or settlers, they don’t “belong” as such, but they learn to practice belonging. They take what they need from their home, while also giving back to it, to ensure their home can be sustained, as well as the others who also live there.

There may not be an immediate benefit to the unlucky insects that fall prey to these pools, but they were never getting out alive anyway. At least they get the honour of being embraced fully into the circle of life, submitting dutifully to the law that binds us all: whoever eats is also eaten.  

The pitcher plant, rather than some individual quirky plant doing what it must do in a nutritional desert, is actually a convening oasis that supports and is supported by multitudes of lives. 

In this mutually-dependent diversity, the plant brings together the entangled processes of life and death. It links creation, destruction, and transformation together, affirming that survival is not about the fittest—it’s about the friendliest.

Don’t be a rock when you really are a bog

The pitcher plant really is resilient and creative. But the source of its celebrated qualities is not its carnivory; it is its mutual hospitality, collaboration, and cooperation. 

This living reality makes it an auspicious symbol for Newfoundland and Labrador after all, just not for the reasons we’ve come to expect. 

The pitcher plant doesn’t just represent home—it also is a home, providing for itself and providing for others at the same time. It’s a place for both connection and conflict, giving and taking, the relationship dynamics that are essential to living. 

Relationships, the pitcher plant teaches, are what matter most–more than roots. The pitcher plant’s roots are small and shallow after all, because it has little need for them. The plant survives primarily through its symbiotic relations with the organisms around it and in it. It gives and receives, it takes and transforms.

This is perhaps the plant’s most important lesson, especially for a province whose population is primarily made up of settlers who still identify other newcomers as Come From Aways—or CFAs. Belonging isn’t a birthright or an inheritance, it’s a practice of relating, of building relationships. Relationships are what create the supportive system of reciprocity that leads to mutual flourishing—not roots, not resources. 

Through its relationships, the pitcher plant turns a seemingly infertile landscape into a rich, vibrant, and sustainable community that supports the conditions for present and future life.

It’s curious, in hindsight, that I got to know the pitcher plant during my many visits to the punch bowl this summer. The pond, I can only assume, is named after its shape. It doesn’t just look like a punch bowl, it also functions like one. It serves as a communal gathering spot, attracting humans and dogs, frogs and water striders alike, among a host of other life, showing up needing relief and finding refreshment. 

This is a great way to describe a swimming hole and the pitcher plants that adorn it, too. After all, sarracenia’s solution is not unlike punch, insofar as it’s a mixture of many things, bitter, sweet, strong, and weak. 

Punch, as it turns out, comes from paantsch, a loanword from Hindi meaning “five” for the number of ingredients it contains: alcohol, sugar, citrus, water, and spices. The British, in their exploits, took the practice from India.   

While punch bowls are a bit of a rarity since COVID arrived at the party, they are nonetheless a useful analogy for the pitcher plant’s function; they provide a place to quench our thirst and at the same time affirm our fundamental need for connection—something we all share.

Newfoundlanders and Labradorians live in a “harsh and unforgiving environment,” our province’s brand messaging tells us. And much like the pitcher plant, “it’s our fierce determination and tenacity that give us the strength to rise above, facing the sun and the future with youthful optimism.”

Indeed, to live on this island, or the “Big Land” above it, is to be caught between a “Rock” and a hard place.  It demands fortitude and a thick skin. But the bog-dwelling pitcher plant reminds us that, beyond the province’s stony coastal armour, is a soft, life-sustaining heart.  

If you really look closely at a pitcher plant, you’ll notice it doesn’t face the sun. Its blossoms bow earthward, refusing to look skyward at all. It’s not the glory of the distant, intangible light the plant is after (maybe it knows better around here). Instead, it’s looking down. 

Pay attention to where you stand, the pitcher plant gestures, and to everyone and everything that keeps you standing, because you cannot do it alone.