Hello, and welcome to the windowsill. My name is Thomas Upton. I'm a pharmacist here in Wilmington, which means I spend my days counting very small things very carefully, and I spend my evenings and weekends with about forty plants that eat bugs. My wife Shirley says the two are related. I can't argue.

On this page: how I got started, why the Venus flytrap matters so much around here, the bog garden I built in the back yard out of a kiddie pool, the basics of keeping these plants alive, and the ones I'm saving up for. There's a full Care Sheet for people who want the details, and a list of My Collection, every plant, where it lives and where it came from.

Like a lot of people, I had a Venus flytrap as a kid. It came from a store in a little plastic cup with a clear lid, I fed it a piece of hamburger, I watered it from the kitchen faucet, and it was black and dead inside of a month. I thought that's just what flytraps did.

It turns out that's what flytraps do when you do every single thing wrong. I found that out in 1995, the year after we moved to Wilmington, when Shirley and I went walking on a nature trail in a state park down near the beach. A ranger pointed down at the sandy wet ground between the grasses, and there they were: wild flytraps, tiny, bright green and red, growing exactly where they're supposed to grow. I must have stood there for twenty minutes. Shirley went on ahead.

The next weekend I bought a flytrap from a local nursery that grows its own. I read everything I could find. I put it in full sun, watered it with rain water and nothing else, and it grew. Then I bought a pitcher plant. Then a sundew. You can see where this goes. Our son Lucas is ten now and has his own shelf, and his teacher has asked him to stop bringing in pictures of things being digested.

People are always surprised by this, so I'll put it in big letters:

Not the jungle. Not the Amazon. Wet, sandy, sunny pine savannas and the edges of bogs, within about a hundred miles or so of Wilmington. That's it. That's the whole native range.

The soil there is so poor that most plants can barely get by on it, and that's the flytrap's trick: it gets the nutrients the soil doesn't have from the insects it catches. It also needs sun, and lots of it. In the old days lightning fires burned through the savannas every few years and kept the shrubs and trees from shading the little plants out. Now, with houses and roads and fires being put out, a lot of that habitat has grown over or been built on.

And there's the other problem. People dig them up. They go into the woods with a trowel and take hundreds of plants to sell, and every one of those is a wild plant that isn't coming back. It's a real problem, and it is a big part of why I put this page up. If you remember one thing from the Hungry Windowsill, remember this: a flytrap from the woods belongs in the woods. More on where to buy them below.

Every trap is a leaf, folded into two lobes with stiff bristles around the edges. On the inside face of each lobe are a few tiny trigger hairs, usually three. Here is the clever part. One touch does nothing. The trap only shuts if something touches the hairs twice within about twenty seconds, either the same hair twice or two different ones. A raindrop or a blowing leaf usually doesn't do that. A bug walking around inside does.

The trap shuts in well under a second, and the bristles cross like the bars of a cage. If whatever is inside keeps moving, the trap seals up tight and starts digesting, which takes a week or more, and then it opens again with an empty bug shell in it. If nothing is inside, it reopens in a day or so.

Now the important part. Each trap can only close a handful of times before it stops working and turns black. Every close costs the plant energy, and a close with no meal at the end of it is pure loss. So when you poke them with your finger or a pencil to watch them snap, you're wearing the plant out. I know it's fun. I did it as a kid. Lucas did it at five. Don't. If you want to watch one close, put the plant outside and be patient. Something will come along.

Charles Darwin was fascinated by the flytrap, by the way, and wrote a whole book about plants that catch insects, back in 1875. I like knowing I'm in good company.

By the spring of 1998 I had run out of windowsill and Shirley had run out of patience with the saucers all over the porch rail. So I built a bog. Here's how, if you want one. It took one Saturday and about $40.

1. Get a hard plastic kiddie pool. Mine is about five feet across and a foot deep, from the discount store. The blue one with fish on it. The fish don't show once it's in.
2. Pick the sunniest spot you have. Full sun, all day if you can. Mine is in the back corner of the yard away from the oak.
3. Dig a hole the size of the pool and set it in so the rim is level with the ground.
4. Poke a few drain holes in the side, two or three inches below the rim. That way it stays wet like a bog should, but after a big summer thunderstorm the extra water drains off instead of drowning everything.
5. Fill it with peat moss and sand, about half and half, mixed well. Use plain sphagnum peat with nothing added (no fertilizer, no lime), and clean washed sand, not beach sand, which has salt in it. I used eight bales of peat and a lot of bags of sand, and mixed it in the pool with a garden hoe and my bare feet.
6. Soak it with rain water until it's wet all the way through. This takes longer than you'd think, because dry peat sheds water like a duck.
7. Plant it. Tall pitcher plants in the back, flytraps and sundews in front where they get the sun and you can see them.

I water the bog from a rain barrel under the gutter on the garage. In a dry spell I go out every evening with the watering can. The bog now holds most of my pitcher plants and the flytraps that are big enough to fend for themselves, and in June, when the pitcher plants are all up and the flowers are out, it is the best-looking thing in the neighborhood. Our neighbor calls it the swamp. He means it nicely, I think.

A bonus I didn't expect: this spring a native sundew came up on its own around the edge, and so did a tiny bladderwort I never planted. The seeds must have been in the peat.

The full details are on the Care Sheet. But nine out of ten dead flytraps die of one of these five things, so here they are:

There's no reason to take a wild plant. Good nurseries grow flytraps by the thousands from seed, from divisions and in laboratories from tiny bits of tissue, and they're healthy, cheap and plentiful. Here's how I buy:

• Buy from a nursery that grows its own and will tell you so. There are good mail-order carnivorous plant nurseries that ship bare-root plants in the spring, and a couple of good local growers around here. Ask how they propagate. A good grower will be happy to talk your ear off about it.
• Be suspicious of bundles of flytraps sold cheap by the side of the road or at a flea market, especially bare-root, in clumps, with sand still on them. Those very often came out of the woods.
• The plastic-cup flytraps at the grocery store are usually nursery-grown, and they're fine plants. They just come with bad instructions. If you buy one, get it out of the cup, into peat and sand, and into the sun, and ignore the part about feeding it hamburger.
• Speak up. If you see people digging plants on public land around here, tell a ranger.

Shirley says there is no "next" until the porch rail is clear. This is my list anyway.

• A tropical pitcher plant (Nepenthes). These are vines from Southeast Asia that hang little pitchers off the ends of their leaves. They want warmth and high humidity all year and no winter rest, so they need their own setup. I have a 20-gallon fish tank in the garage with nobody in it, and a plan.
• Cephalotus, the Albany pitcher plant, from one corner of Western Australia. Tiny, fat little pitchers with lids, like something out of a cartoon. They have a reputation for being fussy, and they're not cheap, so I'm reading up before I try.
• The king sundew (Drosera regia), from South Africa. Leaves almost two feet long, covered in sticky dew. I want to see Lucas's face when it catches a moth.
• The cobra lily (Darlingtonia), from Oregon and northern California, which looks like a snake ready to strike. It wants cool water running over its roots, and a Wilmington July would cook it. Probably never. A man can dream.

• The Savage Garden by Peter D'Amato, which came out last year, is the book I'd hand to any beginner. My copy is falling apart.
• The International Carnivorous Plant Society puts out the Carnivorous Plant Newsletter, which I get, and which is how I learned how much I don't know.
• Small Green Things, here in the RainForest: a botanist who studies mosses writes about the small green things nobody looks at. My whole bog is sitting on sphagnum moss, so I'm grateful to somebody who looks.