Welcome to Plants For Kids™ !
“-- the only web site dedicated to providing quality plants that are fun to grow.”

“Dad, will you grow a Venus Flytrap for me?” my young son asked.  “Sure, easy,” I replied. 

I grew my first Venus Flytraps and Pitcher Plants when I was 12. My buddy Gary Maskarinec and I built our first greenhouse in Idaho Falls, Idaho and filled it with Carnivorous Plants which we bought by mail order.  So now, the interest in these amazing plants had come full circle, to a new generation of kids.

And kids DO love these plants.  They amaze. They spark imagination. They delight. They instill thoughtfulness and wonder.

Being a wholesale nurseryman, I never grow just one of anything.  I dove back into Carnivorous Plants, developed Pitcher Plant breeding programs with Dr. Larry Mellichamp from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, grew Venus Flytrap seedlings by the tens of thousands with the help of Stanley Rehder in Wilmington, North Carolina, developed tissue cultured clones, and now am the proud owner of the world’s first patent on a carnivorous plant, Sarracenia ‘Cobra Nest,’ a beautiful colorful hybrid which is easy to grow, branches freely, and makes a dense full plant.

We have spent considerable time assisting museums and botanical gardens with Carnivorous Plant displays, and I have given numerous talks around the world on this astonishing group of plants.

When we started in 1990, most stores did not sell Carnivorous Plants. When they did, the quality was poor. Small or shriveled plants were common.  When I was a kid, I bought a cellophane bag of Venus Flytrap bulbs, and later a bag of Pitcher plant roots.  What I did not know was that the plants I bought were already dead.

So we saw a wonderful opportunity to change things.  Children, and even adults, deserve the right to buy healthy Carnivorous Plants. 

Plants For Kids ® was born. We dedicated ourselves to making those dreams come true.

Plants For Kids ® is more than Carnivorous Plants, however.  We offer gardeners access to rare and unusual plant varieties which cannot be found in most stores.  It seems that most large stores need “volume items” and refuse to carry plants that are unusual. They are missing the fun.  So we are also dedicated to making those plants available to kids of ALL ages, as we wave our shamelessly brash banner “No Boring Plants!”

I regret that our growing grounds cannot accommodate tours due to zoning restrictions, insurance concerns that visitors may slip in the mud, and all those reasons that are crammed into the small print on liability release forms. 

However, thanks to the wonder of the internet, we’d like to invite you to come join us for a virtual tour of some of our nursery facilities via the links below.

Good Growing!

M. James Booman, owner