An illustration of a purple pitcher plant. Courtesy of the Swallowtail Garden Seeds’ collection of botanical photographs and illustrations.

The vibrant purple pitcher plant is unmistakably evil and cunning.

When it blooms, its burgundy bulb bends over, pointing down like a street lamp towards its curved, cannoli-like leaves. The fleshy green leaves form a rosette around the base of the plant’s stem.

A single organism of Sarracenia purpurea, collected by botanist and bryologist William Sullivant in 1840, is one of the few documented pitcher plants that grew in central Ohio. It’s stored at the Ohio State Herbarium — a collection of dried plant materials used for education and research — which holds a half-million specimens from Ohio, the Midwest and southern South America.

Nectar oozed by the plant attracts insects down into the cupped leaves, John Freudenstein, professor of plant systematics and evolution at Ohio State, said. Tiny hairs that point down into the leaves act like the netting on a lobster trap, and insects can get in but not out.

“They end up falling then into this little soup at the bottom,” Freudenstein, also director and curator of the herbarium, said. Trapped in a mixture of enzymes, bacteria and rainwater, the insects are dissolved for the plant to absorb.

The pitcher plant is one of the few carnivorous plants in North America, according to the U.S. Forest Service. It grows on the banks of wetlands, called sphagnum bogs, where the soil is acidic and low in nitrogen.

“The only way they can live in those situations is to either get that nitrogen from something like an insect that they’re capturing or partnering with fungi,” Freudenstein said.

In nature, nestled between green sedges and brown decomposing moss, the underside of the plant’s petals resembles the color of oxidized blood.

But as a scientific sample, dried on an 11-by-16 piece of archival paper, the reddish purple has disappeared, and the plant is now dull and brown.

“[Pitcher plants are] not that common in Ohio. You have to go farther north, typically where bogs are more common,” Freudenstein said. “For us, there’s really only this one species here, and this is the one that you’re going to run into if you find one at all.”

A purple pitcher plant leaf. Courtesy of Kerbla Edzerdla

The collection was established in 1891 and housed in the Botany Building on the Oval, where the Faculty Club now stands. In 1992, the collection moved to the Museum of Biological Diversity located at 1315 Kinnear Road, Tod Stuessy, former director and professor emeritus, said.

Designated as the State Herbarium, the collection is also responsible for archiving plant material collected by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Stuessy said.

William Sullivant’s 377 total specimens occupy just four pigeonholes in a green metal cabinet and are some of the oldest at the herbarium.

Born in 1803 to Lucas Sullivant — the founder of Franklin County — William Sullivant attended Ohio University and Yale University. Biographer Ronald Stuckey said William Sullivant became interested in botany in the 1830s, and in 1840, published a catalog of plants he collected near Columbus, Ohio.

“He sent plants to people like John Torrey in New York and Asa Gray in Cambridge,” Stuckey said.

Torrey and Gray were two prominent botanists studying the flora of North America and genetic evolution in the 19th century.

After William Sullivant’s death in April 1873, Gray called Sullivant the most accomplished bryologist in the country in an address to the National Academy of Sciences in 1875.

“His works have laid such a broad and complete foundation for the study of bryology in this country and are of such recognized importance everywhere, that they must always be of classical authority; in fact, they are likely to remain for a long time unrivalled [sic],” Gray wrote.

Historical collections such as William Sullivant’s provide scientists a glimpse into how botanical habitats have changed over time.

“That’s one of the real importance of collections like this. That’s why we bother to keep biological specimen collections like this,” Freudenstein said. “We’re documenting the occurrence in time and space of biodiversity.”