#gsnp

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Fly trap details. So many!

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On the positive side, I found this one by googling various phrases kind of about it. “Horsetail pocosin” was the winner, in that it led me to an image that linked to an old discussion thread by someone who’d been hiking in this same swamp. This despite the fact that it is nothing like a horsetail plant (Equisetum spp.), I just thought of the shape/growth habit as similar. It helps to have an extremely specific, concisely-named habitat/plant community, like the pocosin swamps & their nearby pine savannas! If it was bog-standard oak forest I’d have a rougher time.

So let me introduce you to Lycopodiella alopecuroides - Foxtail clubmoss! It is apparently fairly common in the NC coastal plain and uncommon to rare elsewhere up & down the east coast.

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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.

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Pitcher plant details

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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.

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

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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.

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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.