FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

I'm long overdue in posting these photos!

Main photo album here with lots of photos not in this thread:
Matt's photos of Wilmington and Croatan wild flytraps and other carnivorous plants

This spring I made a trip out east to swim in a USMS national Championship open water swim in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

From there I planned to drive east to North Carolina and visit Wilmington and Croatan National Forest to see flytraps in the wild!

These are a few photos from the portion of the trip from Wilmington to Croatan NF.

Me in downtown Wilmington under the metal and glass Venus flytrap statue:


From Wilmington, it was a couple hour drive or so up to the Croatan. Joel Garner, of JoelsCarnivorousPlants, who now lives in Wilmington, came along with me for the ride.

I'm sure there were better spots, as I've seen some other photos with impressive stands of VFTs, but this one was very satisfactory in my opinion!

A photo of the general area where we found the most flytraps and other plants.



Some Sarracenia flava. These guys were pretty hard to spot sometimes as the area had grown pretty thick around them.



Joel checking to see what they might be eating:




Pinguicula lutea


Drosera spatulata (I think?)


Sarracenia purpurea - these guys were growing in live sphagnum very close to the water's edge or in water.


And finally...LOTS and lots of Venus flytraps!









Venus flytrap with an already digested meal.



Open flytrap flowers!



I'm not sure why, but a dozer of some sort had gone through and dug trenches right through some carnivorous plants, including lots of Sarracenia and flytraps. Here's a flytrap hanging on the edge of where the ditch was cut, getting lots of sun and looking healthy!



Probably the largest wild flytrap we saw, with traps well over an inch:


And, much to my surprise, a lot of the flytraps were actually growing well in live sphagnum:





The largest patch of flytraps we saw. A bunch of really healthy specimens mostly growing in live sphagnum:



Me with the find!


One thing that I was kind of surprised by was how small wild flytraps are. The vast majority of the wild flytraps we saw would be what we (FlytrapStore) consider "starter" or "young" sized plants. I guess they can just grow larger in cultivation than in the wild.

It was definitely worth the trip out there and I'm very happy to have finally seen wild Venus flytraps!

Beautiful! Joel is now in Wilmington? I thought he was in Asheville.

katya_dog1 wrote:Joel is now in Wilmington? I thought he was in Asheville.

Joel used to live just a few hours south of me in California. Over the winter he moved his entire operation and family of 5 to Wilmington, NC. He's never lived in Asheville, but there is another grower who does.

Nice pics Matt! Seeing VFTs in the wild is def on my bucket list. I'm in fla atm and I have tons of pics to show when I get back. Thanks for sharing these!

Wow Matt that is awesome! I would love to make a trip there and see them in the wild! It would be pretty awesome to see where some of the cultivars originated from let alone how some can look in their natural habitat.

awesome! the pictures atleast make the traps look big
was it hard to find them? due to the whole poaching thing?
they also look super healthy, quite a few closed traps too

Very flippin' sweet!!!

thanks for sharing, the fly trap in live sphagnum is amazing! so fluffy and cute all together

Very nice Matt. I am going to Maryland this November and hope to see purps there. It would be my first time seeing cps in wild beside drosera rotundifolia. I also might be going to Virginia in the summer and if i do, i plan on going south to see some flytraps. Wonderful pics and plants.

Thanks for the photos, Matt! Looks like an awesome, fun trip!

Mufasa wrote:awesome! the pictures atleast make the traps look big

Hah, well, most of the traps were under an inch in size, which most people would consider small, I think, because of all of the "giant" flytraps in circulation these days.

Mufasa wrote:was it hard to find them? due to the whole poaching thing?

Yes, they were very challenging to find. They're hard to spot when they're not flowering, especially in the tall grass. I had GPS data from a friend that allowed us to locate them quickly. I don't think they were hard to find due to poaching. It's just that the entire forest looks very similar from the road and trying to find the Pocosin bogs where carnivorous plants grow in and around is hard to do. After visiting a couple of locations, I think that the estimate that we regularly hear of "perhaps as few as 30,000 Venus flytraps left in the wild" is probably a drastically low estimate. The site in the photos probably had several thousand itself.

Matt wrote:

katya_dog1 wrote:Joel is now in Wilmington? I thought he was in Asheville.

Joel used to live just a few hours south of me in California. Over the winter he moved his entire operation and family of 5 to Wilmington, NC. He's never lived in Asheville, but there is another grower who does.

Ahh, I had just remembered a carnivorous plant grower who did live there. Well, now that he is in Wilmington, he is in the perfect place to grow flytraps! Moving across the country in no small thing.

Not far from me Matt. Nice pics! Thanks for sharing.