 
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. It’s hard to see at first. A white flower caps a single stalk that rises from the wire grass like an exclamation point. Gadd crouches and pulls back the grass. Down at ground level, spread across the damp sandy soil, you see them: four sets of jaws, spread wide open. Each set of jaws is roughly the size of a quarter—and something in the soil has turned the lips red. Like Mick Jagger, but smarter. You can play with flytraps like pets. Tiny hairs inside the jaws can sense a touch, but the jaws close only if something touches twice. (That keeps leaves out and bugs in.) The jaws close in an eyeblink, like the halves of a tennis ball snapping into place. Gadd takes out the spray bottle and squirts them with a “very, very diluted” solution of Elmer’s Glue. Then she gets out the salt shaker. It has a powdered mix of foreign plant DNA and dye that glows orange under a black light. If this flytrap shows up for sale, wildlife agents can tell that it was poached. Of course, there’s not enough time or money or people to tag every flytrap in the state. The idea is to let poachers know that someone’s watching. The rumor around the swamp is that the dye is radioactive. It’s not. But Gadd doesn’t mind if people think it is. Later, we park right on the shoulder of a highway next to a cluster of flytraps, and pretty soon an old man in a truck pulls up and stops in the middle of the road. Everybody around here knows this is the flytrap patch. He stares at us for a minute and then he says: “Y’all ain’t pullin’ them up, are you?” Gadd stands up and smiles. “No sir,” she says, “just the opposite.” |
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