THERE’S SOMETHING UNSETTLING about the Venus flytrap. When it eats, it behaves more like an animal than a plant, ensnaring unsuspecting insects in its fragrant snapping trap in as little as a third of a second. And while one can understand, rationally, that the flytrap evolved its taste for bugs over tens of millions of years as a means to source more nutrients, watching it move feels suspiciously otherworldly, even alien. It hunts.
“There’s nothing else in the world like it,” retired Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and flytrap maven Julie Moore told me. “Noth-ing,” she said, emphasizing each syllable. To her, the plant’s quirky modifications—its diet, jawlike leaves, and speed—aren’t scary; they’re evidence of Mother Nature’s power to survive, and what inspired Moore’s crusade to protect it.
You can buy the hairy carnivorous plant at garden centers, and even Walmart, but Venus flytraps only grow in the wild in one place on Earth: the wet longleaf pine forests of the Carolinas, boggy areas where scientists estimate about 880,000 individual plants remain in just 74 colonies. A few years ago, Moore, who now runs a flytrap conservation organization, got her hands on a confidential report commissioned by her old agency revealing some of the plant’s last remaining wild clusters.
One of them was in St. James Plantation, a retirement community in Southport, North Carolina. And it was gated, an apologetic real estate agent told us when we arrived at the property’s front office in October. Unless we were there for “real estate purposes,” he said, we weren’t allowed in. Moore, 76, wearing khakis, a long-sleeve periwinkle T-shirt with a luna moth on it, and socks that read “CRAZY PLANT LADY,” explained that we were on the hunt for flytraps. “They’re disappearing fast, and we want to keep them,” she told the agent in her Texas accent, adding that this county, Brunswick—which is among the top 10 fastest-growing counties in the country—has more wild flytraps than anywhere else in the world.
After a bit of friendly chitchat about Moore’s work, the real estate agent relented (“People like old ladies,” Moore had told me) and handed her a map of the property and a gate pass. “All I ask is that you guys buy a house from me in the future,” he said, only half-joking.
St. James
