October 2024

This new store in the Marigny focuses on carnivorous plants  - and the symbiotic relationship between humans and our botanical companions. 

– by Karen Hinton

photos by Ellis Anderson

I talk to my plants all the time, even when it’s about to rain or storm, or when the sun beats down on them, wrangling all their water. Holding a hose over my plants, they talk back by perking up after I’ve quenched their thirst.

“Are you feeling better now, Mr. Elephant Ears? I can tell you are growing despite all this heat,” I always say. He waves at me when he moves left and then right – with or without a breeze. 

Recently I learned much more about the symbiotic relationship between humans and plants from Carlos Detres, the owner of We Bite: Rare & Unusual Plants for Strange & Peculiar People (1042 Franklin Avenue, at the corner of St. Claude).

“If you hang out with plants long enough, they will tell you how they are feeling. You start asking yourself, ‘Why is it doing that?’” explains Carlos, who believes plants are as sentient as humans are. His favorites are carnivorous plants, which he calls “the most fascinating.”  

The We Bite store is bursting with carnivorous plants (and unusual non-carnivorous plants as well), with beguiling names like Pirouette and El Lobo and Pinguicula Primuliflora (all in the enchanting Butterwort family), Prolifera and Spatulata (in the tropical Sundew family), Rebecca Soper and Black Miracle (in the Asian Tropical Pitcher Plant family). 

And of course, there’s the one we’re all familiar with, Venus Flytraps.

Carlos opened this rare, unusual, strange, and peculiar business in 2019 as a pop-up on New Orleans streets, then graduated in 2020 (during the pandemic) to a call-and-deliver service.  This year, We Bite blossomed in a bricks-and-mortar Marigny location, in a building that now boasts a show-stopping mural of carnivorous plants, painted the greenest of green and orangest of orange.  

When I visited We Bite, the business phones rang every few minutes. According to Carlos, what has driven the business from the beginning is people’s awe of carnivorous plants. 

“Customers generally have never seen carnivorous plants,” he says. “I’m enjoying it as much as they do.”

Carlos was a full-time photographer in New York City until he visited New Orleans and fell in love with the city. He and his wife moved in 2019. When COVID hit a year later, their pop-up had to pop down, but he and his wife Aryn began delivering plants to people who needed them to fight the loneliness, the depression, and the trauma from the pandemic.

“The response was overwhelming. So many people wanted plants to help control their anxiety by having something to take care of,” said Carlos.

The couple began looking for a location to open a shop during the pandemic and Carlos had trouble finding an affordable location. 

“I hadn’t realized that the space we’re in now was available. My wife had to convince me to go see it. I thought the architect [their landlord] only wanted me to identify plants to place in the firm’s office.”

Carlos’ plants must have been sending chemical messages to him – and perhaps to the architects.  

“Sometimes, we don’t hear what we need to hear until we finally hear it. Well, I heard it, and here we are. It was really the right time. The rent was affordable. The space is exactly what we need. 

“We didn’t have a lot of money. We bought everything with credit cards. I painted. Arranged the vendors. We opened our doors, and it’s been great ever since.”

“Plants have a chemical language that sends messages to other plants and helps us determine their health. When you take care of them they release a chemical that makes you take care of them – even more than you might have planned.”

And, they take care of each other. 

“If something is bothering a plant, they let other plants know. It may sound crazy but they definitely do that. Trees, too. [For instance], when we move plants, they droop and get depressed. By allowing us to help them, plants can help cure depression in humans.  They know a whole lot about trauma.”

Trauma made its way into the Detres’ home soon after they moved to New Orleans when Aryn discovered she had a rare cancer. She also discovered she was pregnant, later delivering a premature baby. Today Aryn is healthy, and her daughter is now four, often helping her parents at We Bite. The couple credits their relationship with plants with helping uplift them through those challenging times. 

Carlos’ love of plants was grounded early by his grandmother when he was growing up in Florida. 

When Carlos was ten years old, he got his first Venus plant. Under the watchful eye of his grandmother, Carlos said, he began reading everything the encyclopedia had on plants, discovering along the way that Darwin’s own passion had been botany. 

“My grandmother had told me plants were actually mobile, that they can move. She told me about the praying plant, Echeveria Madiba, the national plant of Puerto Rico. It’s also grown in New Orleans. You touch it, and it droops. It’s a very sensitive plant.”

In college in Apopka, Florida Carlos studied art, photography, and film, but he could never let go of his plants. “Oddly, Apopka is the foliage capital of the world. We order some plants from there. But, we grow most of our plants right here.”

“I grew up in the South. What I love is living in a place with a sense of wonder, like New Orleans, like Florida. It’s the child in me. We love experiencing the strange, devilish things that have occurred through the evolution of plant life.”  

New Orleans, according to Carlos, has perfect weather for carnivorous plants and could become the foliage capital of the world – if we learned how to take better care of our environment.  “If it wasn’t for the clay and sand in New Orleans, we could grow anything given the amount of water we receive.” 

Just a stone’s throw away, the North Shore has many carnivorous plants growing wild, as does the entire Gulf Coast. But Carlos notes “too many of these plants are endangered because of development, the changes in weather, and water pollution.”

Carlos’ motivation to start We Bite has been his desire to educate more people about plants in general, but carnivorous plants, specifically. When he purchased them for himself before opening the store, he often received incorrect information on how to care for them. So in addition to having very specific care instructions on their website, We Bite offers parties and get-togethers for people to learn more about plants and how to protect them. 

“Part of our purpose, the plant’s purpose, is to educate,” says Carlos. “This has been an education for me too – it’s become more fascinating than photography and artwork. The more interest I had in cultivating them, the more I began to understand how important they are. People are starting to come around and understand that we have to be smart about vegetation.” 

For example, carnivorous plants are extremely picky about their water consumption. If you use anything other than rainwater or distilled water to hydrate them, they will change their behavior, stop talking to you, become very depressed, and may even die. 

“New Orleans rains buckets of water. That’s why we need more rain gardens and rain barrels for our plants. It’s a much more sustainable way to take care of them,” advised Carlos. 

Carnivorous plants catch their own fertilizer, according to the We Bite care guide, which recommends steering clear of Miracle-Gro or other commercial fertilizers.. Once the plants have their dinners – aka prey – the captured nutrients go through their systems and are expelled as fertilizer. 

Carnivorous plants have different tactics to catch and digest what they want to devour. For some, the sap or nectar on their stems plays defense for them. Ants crawl up the plants to eat the sap and then become meals themselves, also saving the plants from insect damage.  

And there’s Nepenthes, the Asian Tropical Pitcher Plant, who is “insidiously genius” about finding prey, Carlos told me.  Mosquitoes, Formosan termites, and other insects lay eggs in the still water of the pitcher plant. When the eggs hatch into larvae, it’s mealtime for the Nepenthes. 

To grow his knowledge, as well as his customers’ knowledge, of plants, Carlos would like one day to plant bog gardens at We Bite and at homes. A bog garden, he said, “emulates whatever bog the plant is from. We get to recreate their own habitat.” 

Other plans for the future include growing more of their own plants so they can control the distribution and protect the plants from hurricane threats in a climate-controlled warehouse with generators. 

Carlos hopes New Orleans will do more to promote the magnificent plants that grow in and around the city as well as protect them from pollution, development, and the impacts of climate change.

“New Orleans has the best and most amazing plant stores and nurseries in the country, within a two-mile radius of our store,” he says.  “It’s really awesome to be part of that.

“But our nurseries are a missed opportunity for the city. We had a customer who said they planned their trip to New Orleans around our hours. The city has the bars, it has the restaurants, but we also should be known for the plants we grow right here in New Orleans.”

 “Because growing plants can change the world. Change the world and change people.” 

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