Carnivorous Garden

Venus Flytrap

Like most of us, I once assumed a plant that actually eats things must live thousands of miles away in some exotic, tropical rain forest surrounded by howling monkeys and other things I can't name.  The truth is actually stranger than this assumption:  many carnivorous plants are right at home here in Southeastern North Carolina.  In fact the most famous carnivorous plant of all, the Venus Flytrap, is native to just a few boggy areas within a 90-minute drive of Wilmington.


A carnivorous plant is a plant that traps and digests insects for food.  Most plants don't have to resort to such extreme measures since they can derive everything they need for life from sunlight and soil they grow in. Eastern North Carolina has very mineral-pool soils; a good portion of the Coastal Plain of the state is either bright white beach sand or black organic peat, both of which contain very few beneficial minerals that plants need.  Heavy rainfall leaches minerals from the upper layers of the soil leaving only the non-soluble sand or peat behind.

Carnivorous plants are at home in waterlogged black organic peat soils.  These boggy areas are technically called pocosins, an Algonquin Indian word that means swamp on a hill.  The Nature Conservancy has been instrumental in protecting these rare areas, and the plants and animals that depend on them, from destruction. Their Green Swamp Preserve in Brunswick County and Shaken Creek Preserve in Pender County contain wonderful examples of the plant diversity that exists in Southeastern North Carolina.  The Wilmington office of the Nature Conservancy maintains a very informative blog detailing the natural wonders of this part of the state here.

Pitcher Plants in the
Green Swamp Preserve

It would be criminal if I didn't at least try to raise a few carnivorous plants in my yard.  The Nature Conservancy folks actually helped me out in this regard:  my family and I participated in a guided tour of their Green Swamp Preserve this spring and as parting gifts received a couple of Venus Flytraps.  It's a federal crime to remove these endangered, protected plants from their natural environment, so the plants we received were cloned in a laboratory at Southeastern Community College in Whiteville, NC.



We took the two Venus Flytraps, added a couple of Pitcher Plants bought at a local farmer's market, plus a few Sundews I saved from destruction at a construction zone at the Wilmington airport, and created a backyard Carnivorous Garden of my very own.  With just a few plants to start with the entire "garden" only measures about 1 x 2 feet across.

My tiny Carnivorous Garden

Pitcher Plants and Sundews both grow wild in the same boggy, mineral-poor soils where Venus Flytraps grow, but they are less exacting in their climate requirements and can grow in many areas across North America from Canada to Mexico.  I bought a small bag of peat from the local garden center but knew that my sandy backyard soil would drain too quickly to support the carnivorous plants.  My solution was to create a "perched" water table by digging down about six inches and adding a layer of cat litter about one-inch thick with a raised lip around the edge.  Most cat litter is made of an impermeable clay called Bentonite.  Rain water percolating down through the peat collects in this clay "tray" and creates a miniature bog, perfect for growing carnivorous plants.

Carnivorous plants are adapted for areas with very mineral-poor soil.  That means you should never add fertilizer and never water these plants with tap water or well water.  The dissolved mineral content will damage and eventually kill the plants.  Pure rainwater is definitely the way to go.

There do exist tropical carnivorous plants that I could never grow outdoors here due to the freezing temperatures we receive during the winter.  The varieties of carnivorous plants I'm growing actually require a period of cold weather just like many temperate trees do, or else they eventually die.

Here are a few photos of my Carnivorous Garden plants:

Yellow Pitcher Plant

A Purple Pitcher Plant.  The downward-pointing hairs don't allow crawling insects to perch and they fall into a pool of water deep within the curled-up leaf.  The minerals from the insect's decaying body then feed the plant.

A Venus Flytrap growing in my Carnivorous Garden.  There are tiny guard hairs inside each trap.  If two or more
 hairs are triggered by an insect within a short period of time, the trap closes, killing and digesting the insect.

A small collection of native Southeastern North Carolina Sundews.  The sticky spines on the leaves attract, then entrap small insects.  The minerals from the insect's bodies are absorbed to feed the plant.