Venus’s Flytrap

“This plant,” wrote Darwin, “is one of the most wonderful in the world.”
He was talking about the Venus flytrap, Latin name Dionaea muscipula.
That’s its Linnaean binomial, anyway—an irony, seeing as how Linnaeus
Doubted its existence, as “against the order of nature as willed by God.”
Dionaea in Greek is Dione’s daughter, Aphrodite—or, in Latin, Venus,
A somewhat roundabout and epithetical way of indicating the goddess.
That second word, muscipula, is odd. It can mean flytrap or mousetrap.
The former would descend from the Latin musca; the latter, from mus.
There are no reported cases of a Venus flytrap’s having eaten a mouse.
In the jungles of Borneo grows a carnivorous plant that can eat rodents,
The giant montane pitcher plant. It has deep traps, in the shape of urns.
Mainly it eats the rodents’ feces, but every so often one does tumble in.
A flytrap might occasionally catch a tadpole, under freak circumstances.
Mostly they eat spiders, beetles, ants, grasshoppers, and flies, of course.
Flytraps secrete a juice that calls like Turkish Delight, to the hapless prey.
The plant is named for Venus because its trap, the lobes, resemble labia,
Or at least they can be plausibly imagined to resemble a woman’s labia,
Perhaps in the tumescent state that with certain women attends desire.
Its first name, in the 18th-century botanical world, was tippitytwitchet,
Which also contains, supposedly, an obscure vagina joke of some kind.
That was a randy circle of obsessives, the early colonial plant-collectors.