continent-of-wild-endeavor – Kihaku-Gato's Garden Blog (tumblr import)

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

Details on some of the purple pitchers. That top one is quite successful!

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

Yellow meadow beauty – Rhexia lutea

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

It’s a good thing the flowers stick up as high as they do, though, or we probably would have missed this clump of S. purpurea! They’re so different from the yellow ones (S. flava) and yet so similar.

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

Pitcher plant details

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

And then! There were pitcher plants! A similar experience, in that we first saw a few and then kept seeing them everywhere. These are Sarracenia flava.

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

The fly traps were easy enough to spot, despite the lush growth and their relatively small size (littler than I’d realized!) because they were also in bloom! They grow a long flower stalk to keep their pollinators (primarily beetles & sweat bees) away from the digestion zone. This is post to appreciate their loveliness.

And they are lovely, in an almost…I don’t want to say in a ‘pedestrian’ way, because it’s insulting, and they really are nice. It’s just that the action on the ground, with the modified leaves that can count and stand like gaping maws, ready to trap unsuspecting insects, are so alien, so different from most plants I see, that the flowers seem almost common. But they really are beautiful, and I thank the actual camera (vs my usual cell phone) for helping me capture that about them, little drops of dew and all.

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

Now that I’m back to dealing with my drafts, we’re gonna look at how fucking weird pitcher plants’ flowers are. Well, the whole plant is weird I guess, but after how conventional the fly traps’ flowers are, these are indeed bizarre. When we saw them, they were towards the end of their bloom cycle, but they’re like…a fleshy simulation of a flower, with the basic standard shape but lacking the feel. Two different species here: Sarracenia flava and S. purpurea, colors coordinating with those of their pitchers.

I love them

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

And then….! The venus fly traps! !!!

Once we spotted that first big fucker, we were seeing them everywhere. They were so cool, and so abundant! They’re native to just this area of North & South Carolina, where the soil is just right for them and people leave them the hell alone because it’s a hot, buggy swamp. (Plant poachers fuck off – there are armed guards posted here. Some of them are water moccasins.)

J caught a bug and fed it to one for my nieces/all of us to watch. They close so fast!

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

I believe this is Gillenia trifoliata, also known as bowman’s root, Indian physic, or American ipecac. It apparently likes dry open woodlands with acidic soil, which fits where we saw it on the wildflower hike (in a power cut, on a slope, and in NC where basically all the soil is acidic). It could also be Gillenia stipulata and I just can’t quite seen any of the characteristic rounded stipules in these photos, but I doubt it. Otherwise the two species, which comprise the whole genus, are quite similar, and share their common names and medicinal uses. You can probably guess what one of those uses might be from the name “American ipecac”, and the rest you can google.

continent-of-wild-endeavor:

Omie thinks it’s hot already. I told her to get tougher, but I also took her down to the river so she could lay in the water.