October 27, 2019 — When I first learned that New Hampshire had carnivorous plants, I immediately went to find some. It was summertime of 2012, and we found
pitcher plants in a bog in Forsaith Forest in Chester. Apparently, the state (and all New England) also has sundews and bladderworts, but I haven’t seen those in the wild yet.
This year, we decided to do another bog walk, this time in Ponemah Bog in Amherst. We weren’t looking for carnivorous plants. We thought it was too late in the year for them. We just wanted to get outside in the Autumn air for a bit, and this place was pretty accessible. It was a short walk of less than a mile across wooden planks that kept us from falling knee-deep into what looked like solid ground.
However, we found a bunch more pitcher plants. And what we learned was that pitcher plants turn reddish-purple in the Autumn. This also makes them look about a thousand times more ominous (so a thousand times more cool).
This might become a new Halloween Season tradition for us. Walking through chilly bogs and looking down for foliage instead of looking up. Just need a few swamp witch scarecrows set up along the trail.
