09/17/2026
Yes sir, the “Carolina Bays” harbor these five unusual meat digesting plants that only grow in a fifty mile radius of CB!
I have a theory!
The Venus flytrap grows wild in exactly one place on earth, and it is right here. 🪰
Not the tropics. Not some remote island. A roughly seventy five mile circle around Wilmington, North Carolina, spilling a little into South Carolina. That is the entire native range of the plant. Nowhere else in the world has it growing on its own.
It lives in the wet sandy savannas of the longleaf pine belt, where the soil is so poor in nitrogen that the plant had to find another way to eat. The trap snaps shut only when two of its trigger hairs are touched within about twenty seconds, which keeps it from wasting a closing on a raindrop. It counts.
It also needs fire. Without regular burning, shrubs shade it out and it disappears. Which is why the wild population has dropped so hard over the last century.
Poaching got bad enough that North Carolina made taking them from the wild a felony in 2014. 🌿
Have you ever seen one growing wild, and did you know it only lives here?
