A botanical field trip to a boggy tract in South Georgia last weekend was billed as a chance to see one of the state’s “largest displays of pitcher plants” and other flora native to Coastal Plains bogs.
The plants were thriving in bogs on a remote 2,000-acre quail hunting plantation in South Georgia’s Brooks County. We Georgia Botanical Society members had been invited there by owners Louis and Barbara Lee, who have made great efforts to protect the bogs.
I have a fondness for carnivorous pitcher plants, which lure, trap and ingest insects to obtain nitrogen and other nutrients that bog soils lack. The bogs themselves are open, sunny wetlands with spongy, acidic soil, sealed at the bottom by clay or organic matter that prevents water from percolating through deeper layers of soil.
Healthy pitcher plant bogs can be places of beauty — “some of the showiest natural gardens” of the Coastal Plains, according to the book “Natural Communities of Georgia.”
The bogs we visited lived up to that description. I was amazed to see huge, dense expanses of pitcher plants stretching across the open, longleaf pine landscape.
Two species of the plants abounded there, the hooded and the yellow pitcher plants. Blooming among them was a profusion of colorful, bog-loving wildflowers: hatpins, spreading pogonias, ladies-tresses, colic-roots, grass pinsk and others.
Another carnivorous plant there was the dew-thread sundew, adept at trapping pesky gnats. We also were surprised to find several specimens of an uncommon, state-protected shrub known as the fevertree (Pinckneya bracteata) sporting its showy, pinkish flowers. It once was used to treat fever.
“It’s uplifting to know that Georgia still has places like this,” said our leader, Tom Patrick, a Department of Natural Resources botanist.
Over the decades, Coastal Plains bogs have lost ground to agriculture, development, fire suppression and other disturbances — threats that remaining bogs still face.
IN THE SKY: From David Dundee, Tellus Science Museum astronomer: The moon will be first quarter on Thursday. Mercury and Venus are low in the east around dawn. Mars is very low in the west at dusk. Jupiter is high in the east around dusk. Saturn rises out of the east just after sunset.
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