Something I did not know until this past week-- carnivorous plants are not unique to the tropics. In fact, you can find them across most of the planet, including Europe & well up into Canada. Ohio in particular has at least four different
Native species of carnivorous plant & they tend to be extremely rare.
Purple Pitcher Plant (Serracenia Purpurea Purpurea)
Saying Purpurea twice wasn't a typo. The plant has three wild regional variants & you need to get the correct one for your region. They can be pretty easily told apart by coloration, luckily. The main one from south of the Great Lakes has a purple tinge to it. The southern variety, Venosa, is redder & the northern variety, Heterophylla, has no special coloration & is solid green. A downside I am expecting to deal with is that mosquitoes breed in them, but they've also been shown to have anti-viral properties (apparently, Native Americans ended up landing on Pitcher Plants specifically to treat Smallpox.), so maybe this will also cut down on certain diseases spread by mosquitoes in some way & concentrating them in a certain area might be good for frogs &
bats.
Oblong-Leaved Sundew (Drosera Intermedia)
I think we may have several species of Sundews in the region, but this was the one I settled on. They have an extremely wide range, which runs from the Caribbean to Canada.
Bladderwort (Utricularia)
These were a type of carnivorous plant I was not familiar with. They grow mostly underwater &
project a net-like structure into the
water which mimics
roots, or may even be the roots, I don't know. Small things swim into this structure, causing little bladders to puff up with air & squeeze the prey between them, so it can
feed. We also have multiple species of these.
Due to the market for the plants, you can find some of Ohio's native ones in both full plant & seed, though the seeds are a bit on the expensive side
online. A little more than double what I usually pay on other sites. But, I did just order seeds of two species-- Purple Pitcher Plant & Oblong-Leaved Sundew. With luck, these ought to sprout pretty quickly next year. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of effect their presence has on the
local environment. They can grow in woods & out in the open & prefer swampy areas-- basically, a lot of groundwater saturation & poor soil, which we have a lot of, so they
should do amazingly well.
I didn't know how well known this was, or how common these kinds of plants are throughout the Midwest & Eastern Canada, so I thought I would bring it up on here & see what other people thought.
