Little Bog of Horrors

They look so bright and cheerful, don't they? Well, don't be fooled by them because they eat meat and they may even grab you as you walk by. This is my post, or one of them, for Halloween, and very appropriate, I thought, because these are carnivorous plants, the Yellow Pitcher Plant, Sarracenia flava, with several pitchers or specialized leaves and a flower.

I've posted pictures from this place before, but we make a trip there every year to see these amazing plants. They grow in a muskeg or floating bog on a lake south of us and there are five species of carnivorous plants growing there, one native and three non-native, and all very well established and thriving, especially these Yellow Pitchers and also the Purple Pitcher Plant.

No one seems to know who planted them in the bog or when, and there are, of course, issues with introducing non-native plants into an area, though this bog is remote enough and isolated enough that there is very little chance that they are going to spread elsewhere. Nor do they seem to be competing with the native plants or crowding them out.

We went to the bog with a friend and found, as usual that access to the floating mat of vegetation on which these plants grow to be rather difficult - a a kind of balancing act over old sunken logs and floating boards with fairly deep water all around. In the end we all fell in and were wet to our waists and though we wore boots had to pour the water out of our boots when we arrived back at the car.