A Homegrown Plant With a Taste For Blood Gets New Life

The Venus flytrap is no stranger to enemies. Smaller than a cupped palm, green and spiky, indigenous to the longleaf pine ecosystem of North Carolina’s Sandhills and coastal plain, the flytrap has faced certain adversaries for years: development, overgrowth, the eager fingers of children, and crashing feet of off-trail hikers.

This summer, the Venus flytrap defeated a different kind of adversary: a long bureaucratic wait in the Rules and Operations of the Senate Committee, where proposals for a specialty license plate benefiting the plant had stalled repeatedly since 2020. With the passage of House Bill 199 this summer, North Carolinians can now enjoy a license plate championing the state’s official carnivorous plant.

For each $30 license plate order, $20 goes to the N.C. Botanical Garden Foundation, which will share proceeds with Friends of Plant Conservation to support plant conservation work throughout the state. 

“Everyone in the world knows what a Venus flytrap is,” said Damon Waitt, director of the Botanical Garden. “But hardly anybody in the world knows that they’re from North Carolina. There’s a conservation and educational message in the plate, that North Carolina, just like it’s first in flight, it’s also the home of the Venus flytrap.”

The journey of the flytrap’s license plate status began in 2019, when the N.C. Botanical Garden Foundation and Friends of Plant Conservation approached Durham-based artist and landscape architect Preston Montague with their idea. Montague specializes in botanical illustrations and digital artwork, focusing on native plants. 

His design features lime-green flytraps, pink background vegetation, and “North Carolina” in bright red capital letters. Inside the largest flytrap sits a sky-blue fly, its red eyes bulging, the end of its life surely drawing near.

“The Venus flytrap doesn’t, to me, seem like an austere plant,” said Montague. “It’s got drama to it. And so I wanted a color palette that was, like, challenging, and dramatic, to really help describe and provide a visceral feeling of the excitement of this plant.”

The flytrap, known for its bright colors and a taste for blood, is currently considered threatened in the state of North Carolina. It grows natively only in a 90-mile radius outside Wilmington, in what are known as “ecotones”—acidic, nutrient-poor areas between the longleaf pine savanna and the swampy pocosin. Under optimal conditions, the flytrap can live for up to 20 years.

But the flytrap has lost much of its habitat to the development rapidly converting wetlands into subdivisions and golf courses. Brunswick County, home to the 17,424-acre Green Swamp Preserve, is the state’s fastest-growing county and was among the 10 fastest-growing in the nation between 2021 and 2022. 

In the face of a changing landscape and huge population influx, local residents are poised to become the Venus flytrap’s biggest protectors. But while conservation concerns motivate many, others have dug and sold the plants for decades as a form of supplemental income. As the license plate finally makes its appearance, these two groups have an opportunity to connect in support of the plant. If not, the flytrap may grace more cars than native groves.

The Not-So-Wetlands 

The stretch of land just inland from Oak Island and Southport used to be known to locals as brimming with flytraps. Now those wetlands are often dry, replaced by St. James Plantation, a 6,000-acre gated housing development with an 81-hole golf course, a marina, and a private oceanfront beach club.

“Vacant wetland with flytraps growing on it can’t compete with the tax dollars that a new development brings,” said Cindy Evans. Joe Wood, Evans’ late partner, owned and ran Flytrap Farm, a now-closed nursery near Holden Beach that grew and purchased the plants from local collectors. Prior to 2014, one could obtain a state-issued permit to harvest flytraps from the Green Swamp and other groves in and around Brunswick County. Doing so without a permit was a misdemeanor offense.

But in 2013, a theft of over 1,000 Venus flytraps from Stanley Rehder Carnivorous Plant Garden in Wilmington alarmed conservationists and lawmakers. The garden was additionally damaged by a group of people—“hoodlums, for lack of a better term,” said state Rep. Ted Davis—who drove onto the property and did “doughnuts,” destroying numerous Venus flytraps. In response, Davis sponsored a bill making it a felony to dig Venus flytraps anywhere except private property with the permission of the landowner. The North Carolina General Assembly passed the law in 2014, with overwhelming support from conservationists and wildlife officers.

The arrests started quickly. Just a month after the law took effect, four men were arrested in Pender County and charged with felonies for poaching. All four were convicted, with three sentenced to supervised probation and one sentenced to 6 to 17 months incarceration. Since then, at least three more people have been arrested for poaching. Ten years later, “there’ve definitely been fewer thefts,” Davis said. “A Class H felony is a whole lot more deterrent than a misdemeanor.”

Sgt. Matthew Criscoe, with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission, isn’t so sure. “We are constantly chasing the poachers,” he said. “It’s not the fact that they’re slowing down any. It’s just that they’re getting more careful.”

But for some locals, this Venus flytrap protection measure has done more harm than good. “Flytrapping” had long been a source of income primarily for Black families, who sold wild plants to nursery owners, private collectors, and out-of-town buyers involved in the medicinal production of flytrap tinctures and supplements. Losing this income and cultural activity was a major blow.

A Family Tradition

When Jimmy Wortham was arrested for poaching flytraps in January 2015, his first reaction was confusion. 

Raised in Longs, South Carolina, he’d collected Venus flytraps since he was 7 years old. His foster grandfather had taught him how, and Wortham quickly learned that while $0.25—the average per-flytrap going rate at the time—wasn’t a lot, you could make a profit if you harvested hundreds. 

Then a 23-year-old living in Holden Beach with two children and a restaurant job, Wortham flytrapped both to supplement his income and because he loved the plant.

“It’s just amazing to me how a Venus flytrap survives,” Wortham said. “It depends on itself, and it knows what it can do to bring forth life. Where it’s positioned in the world. And I really, really feel like I’m connected with that.”

Wortham had heard about the new law but thought it applied only to “protected land” like the Green Swamp—not a problem for someone like him, who knew the locations of dozens of small flytrap groves in ditches and power line corridors throughout Brunswick and Pender counties. So when he and three acquaintances were stopped by police after a wintry day of digging, Wortham was sure there’d been a mistake. 

“They wasn’t supposed to lock us up,” he said, “because we wasn’t on reserved land. We were, like, on the side of the highway.”

The worst part of his arrest was feeling like no one understood what happened from his point of view—he’d never intended to commit a crime. By the time Wortham was convicted on the felony charge and sentenced to two years’ probation, he had lost his restaurant job along with custody of his children. “Start to finish, they wasn’t hearing my story,” Wortham said. “Nobody cared. Nobody.”

Wortham wasn’t the only one taken by surprise. Take the case of Bolivia resident Ms. Williams, who began flytrapping in 1975 with her husband and asked only to use her last name, citing concerns about how community members might respond. Harvesting the plants was both a form of supplemental income and a family tradition. “We’d always go out there and see who could get the most and see who could make the most money that day, and come back and sit under the tree and drink our beer and cut them and count them,” she recalled. 

Many of Williams’ family members had state-issued permits that allowed Venus flytrap digging, which the new law rendered obsolete. When Williams heard the news from a friend, she couldn’t believe it. “At first I thought she was lying to me,” she said. “And then I thought, why would she lie?”

Williams had stopped digging flytraps before the law was passed, due to her age and responsibilities raising grandchildren. But from her perspective, the new law inappropriately punishes collectors. She believes former permit holders should be grandfathered in so that traditional harvesters can continue their long-standing occupation. 

“What about those developers that’s coming in here destroying these billions and billions and trillions of Venus flytraps, and taking the wetlands away, and putting concrete on top of it?” she said. “People have been digging flytraps for decades. And they always come back.”

From her experience with her partner’s plant nursery, Evans believes flytrappers of generations past deserve credit for the flytrap’s endurance in coastal North Carolina. They seeded the groves from which they dug and took care not to harvest too many at a time. “It was sustainable farming,” Evans said. “They’d plant it, and they’d go the next year and get only the biggest ones.”

Now, with available land disappearing and stringent protections in place, these community practices may be breaking down. 

For Brunswick County NAACP President Carl Parker Sr., the issue is not only cultural but spiritual. A member of the Gullah Geechee community, Parker sees Venus flytraps, sweetgrass, and other native plants and animals as “the resources that God had already put here … a way that folks can make a living.” 

To Parker, the new law “was targeting Black folks.”

The Flytrap Forum

On the morning of May 30, the Boiling Spring Lakes Community Center parking lot in Brunswick County filled up early. Inside, the community center teemed with activity. Attendees filled long tables facing a PowerPoint presentation. In one corner, people crouched behind a painted wooden rendering of Venus flytraps, inserting their faces into the center for photos. 

The Flytrap Forum brought together many from the conservation movement. They included Julie Moore, a Raleigh-based biologist who has devoted her career to protecting endangered species—and advocating for those species that haven’t made the list yet. 

Moore wore green slacks and a pink shirt adorned with a Venus flytrap. She came to Brunswick County for the first time in the 1970s, as a graduate student. She’d wondered what the area must have looked like “before all the roads were put in,” she said. 

Two recent setbacks hung over the attendees. The license plate, which had been submitted to every legislative session since 2020, was still lingering in the Senate four years later. And in 2023, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service declined to list the Venus flytrap as federally endangered, citing at least eight stable flytrap populations remaining in southeastern North Carolina and northeastern South Carolina. 

For Moore, this decision overlooked the fact that the flytrap’s total range has shrunk considerably. “The losses that we’re going to see in the rest of my lifetime are going to exceed the projected loss, is my professional opinion,” Moore said. 

Moore’s strategy is communication: figuring out how to speak the language of the people she needs to persuade and then harnessing their support. In Boiling Spring Lakes, her vision has taken fruition in a citizen activist group, the Venus Flytrap Champions, which responds to alerts of flytrap populations on construction sites, in ditches, and other public spaces. With the help of a government representative, they relocate them to safer areas before they are destroyed.

Stephanie Bodmer, owner of Boiling Spring Lakes Motel, became a flytrap aficionado after hearing about the plant’s plight from Moore. Moore told Bodmer “how wonderful these plants were, and how they had adapted themselves to survive, and how they are at risk of destruction due to development … so she really got me excited.”

Now Bodmer is a dedicated Venus Flytrap Champion and shared some local achievements with others at the forum. After realizing that the state’s Department of Transportation was destroying flytraps through roadside mowing, the Flytrap Champions successfully advocated for the job to be transferred to local mowers who understood the importance of avoiding flytrap groves. And in 2021, the Flytrap Champions successfully petitioned the Board of Commissioners to have the Venus flytrap become Boiling Spring Lakes’ official plant. 

“The more you educate,” Bodmer said, “the more you make people aware, the more they become interested in what you’re trying to do here.”

The ultimate threat is not Venus flytrap extinction; the plants are readily available at Walmart and on Amazon, mostly grown from seed in nurseries and then sold to distributors. But wild flytraps are another story.

The forum also recognized a group of four wildlife officers who obtained arrest warrants for a recent poaching incident  with a Flytrap Champion Award. Two local people removed nearly 600 plants from land managed by the Nature Conservancy in Boiling Spring Lakes before getting stopped and searched at a gas station nearby. The officers were commended for using “patience, guile, and an intimate knowledge of the landscape” to apprehend the suspects.

“If y’all know the folks who are doing this,” said Criscoe, “they’re pretty good woodsmen, so it takes a lot of effort to try to apprehend them.” Many of the same families, Criscoe said, have been digging flytraps for generations.

“It seems like they’d learn if they get penalized enough, doesn’t it?” Moore asked.

“You would think,” Criscoe replied.

‘Meant to Go Viral’

Williams would have liked to attend the Flytrap Forum and tell her version of the Venus flytrap story. But she didn’t hear about it until it was already over—a common occurrence in a community where conservationists and former flytrappers largely do not know each other’s names. Historic distrust has placed these two groups at odds with one another.

A fundamental piece of the disagreement for Williams and other former flytrappers is the degree to which the plant is threatened. 

“A lot of scientists don’t know how to count flytraps,” Wortham said. “When they’re in a patch, it’s really, really hard for them to understand how many there is without separating each one of them.” 

A history of unreliable flytrap figures lends some credence to Wortham’s theory. In the 2010s, total Venus flytrap populations were repeatedly reported to hover around 30,000—though the source for that number is unclear. In 2018, conservation biologist Dr. Laurie Hamon produced a conservative estimate of 73,000-158,000 plants living natively in the wild based on many different sources. A 2019-22 multi-agency study headed by the Natural Heritage Program yielded a much higher estimate of 879,167 flytraps in the Carolinas.

Roger Shew, a geologist who teaches at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, said those scientists who worked with flytraps always knew the total population was far greater than the previous low estimates—the problem was dedicating the time and manpower to counting them.

Since 2013, Shew and his wife have conducted an annual Venus flytrap study for the Nature Conservancy in the Green Swamp, monitoring multiple plots and transects for numbers of flytraps, percentages of plants flowering, and evidence of poaching. Flytraps “are small,” Shew said, “and often grass covers them. My wife and I crawl on the ground to fully count the plants in our plots and transects.”

The day after the forum, Shew led a tour of Green Swamp Preserve and its carnivorous plant life. Green Swamp Preserve is managed by the Nature Conservancy, allowing for prescribed burns and other habitat maintenance required by the Venus flytrap and other plant life. In June 2023, a nearby prescribed burn by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission surged out of control, burning 16,000 acres before it was stopped. 

A fire that size would spell death for many species, but not the flytrap and other species in this fire-dependent ecosystem. One year later, the swamp was green again, and its carnivorous plants were thriving. Spidery sundews glistened in the sun next to groves of spiny flytraps. Two days earlier, Shew said, a four-foot alligator wandered out of a nearby pond in search of a fresh body of water.

This is the same land where Wortham learned to collect flytraps and where Williams and her family would frequently come to dig. Now, there were no signs of people unearthing flytraps. There were butterflies and bugs, longleafs and loblollies. Colic root, historically dug and sold by Native tribes in North Carolina, shot up its white blooms. Just beyond the woods, on Highway 211, was the constant rush of cars heading for the golf courses, the marinas, the beach.

In July, the long-awaited specialty license plate bill became law, and plates have now begun arriving to those with pre-orders. So many years have passed since the original pre-orders that some people, like Melody Kramer of Carrboro, no longer own the same vehicles. 

But that hasn’t put a damper on the excitement. The license plate is “meant to go viral,” Kramer said, “and you can’t say that for a lot of, like, DMV things.”

Williams heard about the new license plate on the news. She was impressed by the statewide attention to the Venus flytrap, though this raised a question: “So why are they steady destroying them?”

Still, Williams loves the design—the bold, eye-popping plant she knows so well. She plans to purchase one.

Sara Heise Graybeal is a Pittsboro native whose writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Carolina Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, and elsewhere. She holds a master’s degree in fine art in creative writing from UNC-Greensboro and a master’s degree in folklore from UNC-Chapel Hill. She lives in Greensboro.