By Tommy Tomlinson | Nov 08 | 

Don't Mess With Venus

A North Carolina conservationist defends a savage plant

The flytrap people mark the best spots like a treasure map. Turn off this highway south of Wilmington, North Carolina. Pull over at that little pond off the side of the road. Walk down to the far end, where the mud starts to suck at your shoes. Look down. Then you see it—a pair of ruby lips built to kiss, then kill.

The Venus flytrap. The smartest plant in the world.

It captures bugs so efficiently that engineers study its mechanics. It has such a fully developed sense of touch that it can tell the difference between leaves and lunch. And its only natural habitat on Earth is this small wafer of the Carolinas, a sixty-mile stretch of land centered on the Green Swamp. Somewhere in here, sometime in the distant first chapters of history, a plant stuck in nutrition-poor soil figured out how to survive by eating bugs—and transformed from vegetation into treasure.

Now the flytrap’s habitat is under assault—from developers who look at a forest and see townhouses; from road builders looking for the shortest distance between two points; from newcomers who make the Carolinas among the nation’s leaders in the number of inbound moves. Drive down N.C. Highway 211, the two-lane that runs through flytrap country, and all of a sudden you run up on a half dozen mammoth subdivisions, all with plantation in the name. Flytraps used to live all along here.

And then there are poachers. In the Smoky Mountains they fill bags with ginseng, the root that gets ground up into energy drinks and black-market aphrodisiacs. Down here in the Green Swamp, the poachers load up flytraps to ship overseas. The soil is so loose and sandy that they’re easy to dig up; the poachers’ tool of choice is a nine iron.

A coalition of conservationists—from scientists to river rats—is working to save the flytrap’s home. The Nature Conservancy is buying up land. State biologists are marking flytraps with invisible tags—CSI-style—to catch poachers.

Laura Gadd is a plant conservation specialist with the state Department of Agriculture. Technically she works out of a century-old building in downtown Raleigh with file cabinets that creak like an old man’s knees. But her real office is the government Plymouth that she drives around the state with the Manual of the Vascular Flora of the Carolinas in the passenger seat. In the spring she hikes the Green Swamp for flytraps. In the summer she climbs outcroppings in the Blue Ridge looking for a pink spiky flower called Heller’s blazing star. In the fall she roams the Piedmont checking on colonies of the endangered Schweinitz’s sunflower.

“I forget that other people don’t think about plants all the time,” she says.

I join Gadd on a hike through the Green Swamp during flytrap tagging season. The ground we’re on isn’t swampy—it’s a savanna of knee-high wire grass under a scattered canopy of longleaf pines. The trees filter the morning light until it looks like mist in the shower. The back of Gadd’s long-sleeved shirt is an inkblot of sweat. (Long sleeves and long pants. The Green Swamp crawls with ticks.)

The trail has tapered from a road to a boardwalk to a path about as wide as your foot. Gadd scans the woods, hoping to find one particular gem. And then she stops.