Sundews

Overview

Sundews are the commonest of the few plants of the Material Plane that catch their food without a mage to make them. They are tiny. They catch gnats and midges on sticky leaves on the moss of the bogs, and they could not hold a mouse. The great hunting plants of marsh tales are Nature Magic or the Verdant Expanse (see Carnivorous Plants); the largest that grows wild on Caeldon, the fen pitcher of the Reedmere, drowns nothing bigger than a bird.

Appearance

A sundew is a flat rosette no wider than a coin, lying on the wet moss. Its leaves are small round or spoon-shaped pads on short stalks, reddish green, covered with fine red hairs, each tipped with a glistening drop of clear, sticky dew. In sunlight a bog full of them sparkles red and silver as if after rain, which gave them their name. In summer each plant raises a thin stalk with a few small white flowers that open only in sun. They have no smell a person can find.

Habitat and Range

They grow on wet, acid, open bog: the sphagnum and sedge of the fen margins in the Confluence Basins, including the Reedmere's edges, and the bogs that open in the clearings of the Elderweald where the ground holds water like a sponge. They need sun, wet, and poor ground, and are crowded out by taller growth.

Behaviour and Temperament

A gnat lands on the dew, drawn by its shine, and sticks. Its struggling bends the nearby hairs over it, and over an hour or so the leaf curls slowly around it and digests it. The leaf opens again in a few days, leaving a dry husk. The bog they grow in is too poor to feed them, and the insects make up the lack.

Life Cycle

A sundew lives a few years, dying back to a tight winter bud on the moss and opening again in spring. It sets dust-fine seed after flowering.

Uses and Dangers

They catch a few of the biting gnats and nothing more. Herb-wives gather them for a cough syrup and a wash for warts and corns, and the Reedfolk use the dew as a sticky dressing for small cuts. They harm no one.

Lore and Belief

Basin folk who have heard the tales of drowning-vines point to sundews as the young of them, waiting to grow; they do not grow. Reedfolk say sundews keep the dew that a bog would otherwise give back to the sun, and that a bog that loses them is drying. Wood Elves call them the bog's small hunters and take them as proof that even the poorest ground finds a way to feed itself.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi