'A wagish plant', 'Miraculum Naturae', 'the most wonderful plant in the world', were a few of the exclamations provoked by one plant, the North American tippitiwitchet which Daniel Solander and John Ellis named Dionaea muscipula, or Aphrodite's mousetrap. The first report of this remarkable plant with spring-trap leaves was written in 1759 by the Governor of North Carolina, Arthur Dobbs, an Ulsterman and one of the founders of the Royal Dublin Society. Best known today as Venus's flytrap, this unique vegetable was the botanical and horticultural sensation of the late 1700s.

Other men who feature in the tipitiwitchet's biography are the great Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, John Ellis, a linen merchant and amateur naturalist of Irish extraction, the botanist Peter Collinson, William and John Bartram of Philadelphia, an eccentric German plant-collector named William Young, and Charles Darwin.

Daniel McKinley has studied the origin of the name tipitiwitchet, and his study appears as a postscript, 'Wagish Plant as Wagishly Described', John Bartram's Tipitiwitchet: A Flytrap, Some Clams and Venus Obscured, in Aphrodite’s mousetrap.

The following is extracted from his essay.

Naturalists have long puzzled over the name Tipitiwitchet, given by John Bartram to the remarkable insectivorous plant known to science as Dionaea muscipula and popularly called Venus's Flytrap. I think that the Bartramian name can be explained ...

While Joseph Ewan wondered if Bartram had learned the name Tipitiwitchet 'from some Indian informant', he provided no clues as to origin or meaning. Heslop‑Harrison supposed it a name known 'to the inhabitants of the Carolinas', where the plant is native. The latter view may be true but I know of no evidence for it; and we have the statement of Johann David Schoepf, an alert German naturalist who travelled in the region of the plant's range in the winter of 1783‑1784 and reported the plant 'known to very few of its inhabitants'. ...

The year 1768 was a memorable one for Tipitiwitchet Sensitive soon to be called by, as I suspect, its Greek-Latin and elegant English equivalents of the country name by which Bartram had known it. William Young took living plants of Tipitiwitchet to England in the summer of that year. He even planned to name the plant (after himself, significantly enough!); according to James Britten, citing a manuscript flora of Carolina plants of 1767, Young proposed that the flytrap bear the generic name 'Youngsonia'.

From specimens in Young's shipment, which Young personally superintended on the trip to England, John Ellis drew his famous plate [see our home page] and wrote an authoritative account which appeared first in a newspaper article in early September 1768...

My foray in search of the roots of the word Tipitiwitchet is first into what Eric Partridge calls 'slang and unconventional English'. A few terms seem particularly enlightening, not all of them slang. 'Tippet' is a fur collar, in ordinary English, and Marlowe's 'Hempen tippet', a hangman's rope, is a poetic embellishment. Farmer has 'Tippet' alone meaning a hangman's rope, with further play on the word in the phrase 'to turn tippet'. A 'Twitch' is a noose for recalcitrant horses. 'Twitchers' are either pincers or tight boots; and, of course, 'Twitchety' is nervous, fidgety, jerky. Additional uses of 'Twitch' and variants of 'Tippet' and 'Tippity' in the Scottish dialect are recorded. All these terms, coupled with Ellis's overworked idea of a trap for mammals, to be mentioned later, parallel the term 'Snatch-box' that Partridge records as used for vulva in popular parlance. Some aspect of the 'Toothed Vagina' may be relevant, as can be traced out in Stith Thompson's Motif Index of Folk Literature.

Further, more specifically American, although the technique must be more widespread, a 'Twitch‑up' is a trap for small animals especially rabbits, consisting of a noose attached to a bent stick or sapling that springs upward when tripped.

Again, Vance Randolph, in his volume of Ozark folk stories, records in no less than seven different tales, the more or less current (early twentieth century) use of the term 'Twitchet' for vulva or associated part of the female pudendum. Finally, vestiges of Elizabethan (and later) English, not yet stifled by radio and television, are heard from senior citizens at a mid-coast Maine hamlet - far from Tipitiwitchet country. They speak of 'Twitchet Avenue', disregarding both its present sanitized label and its presumed current lack of saleable feminine attractions.

Thus, Bartram's ‘little tipitiwitchet' was a vulva-like grasper that wrestled its prey into submission. One might add, for a touch of surrealism, the illusions generated among the distant, imaginative English naturalists, when they had both sportive names and Dobbs' fox‑trap hyperbole to spur them on (and no plants at hand, to correct perspective!). Ellis gave a fervid enough account, after he had seen living plants, although he was correct to impute a deadly aim to the plant's behaviour. While Linnaeus might innocently romanticize that the trapped insect was innocuously released as soon as it became quiet, Ellis correctly surmized that the hapless prey had no such fate in store for it. He aptly referred to the plant as a 'machine to catch food'. Ellis stated this clearly to both Linnaeus and the Duchess of Norfolk.

Upon the middle of the upper joint of the leaf, he wrote, there ‘lies the bait: Many minute red glands, that cover its inner surface, and which perhaps discharge sweet liquor, tempt the poor animal to taste them: and the instant these tender parts are irritated by its feet, the two lobes rise up, grasp it fast, lock the rows of spines together, and squeeze it to death.’

Incorrect though this is in part (for example, the red glands actually secrete digestive juices), the vision of two alluringly baited, reddish semicircles, margined by hairs, ready to wrestle an unlucky prey to the death, was not, except for matters of scale, a terribly overwrought picture. Its parallels with female pudenda, as externally attractive but toothed or otherwise grappling vaginas, need not be pursued.

I suspect that the prurient side of this did not escape Ellis's eye. Tipitiwitchet may have been a little too redolent of the barnyard for his refined taste, but there were ways around that. You first used Classical language and, then, contrived your own English parallel of exactly similar import. I think that is what Ellis did.

[I contributed the following footnote. “Tippitiwitchet is a genuine name; it is not, as some might think, a recent concoction of that arch-coiner of strange words, Beatrix Potter. She did use a similar word - tippity-twitchet - to describe a little girl, “a funny specimen ... a pretty little imp of eight or nine with yellow curls, in the neatest of little blue and pink combination knickerbockers riding a bicycle. A very tippity-twitchet.”]  

© Tippitiwitchet Cottage, 7 March 2006