Hiking the Green Swamp Preserve

 

• Date Hiked:  May 1, 2022
• Total miles Tracked: 2 miles
• Type of Trail: Hiking trail over flat ground
• Conveniences:  None
• Best Features:   Does rare natural vegetation count as a feature? 
• Worst Features:   Little worth mentioning. Bring bug spray and sunscreen.
• Wildlife spotted: none
• Vegetation: Venus flytraps, Pitcher plants, pine and shrubs
• Associated Website:   Green Swamp Preserve | The Nature Conservancy in NC 
• Primary Author:  James

The Green Swamp Preserve isn't terribly far from Wilmington or Myrtle Beach, but it's not really very close to anything. It's not really a tourist destination, nor is it a place to seek out if you're looking for a challenging hike. From a sandy parking lot, you'll be following a narrow track of bare sand through pine forest and low bushes for roughly a mile out, then a mile back on the same path. To the casual eye, it seems like a fairly boring walk. 

So what's the draw of this destination? 

Flytraps. Pitcher plants. Sundews. The barren soil creates the perfect climate for carnivorous plants, some of which are found almost nowhere else in the wild. A landscape that looks almost barren is instead a wonderland of rare species. 

If you plan to go, late May through early June is the best window for spotting the Venus flytraps since they send up flowers during this time, making them easy to spot. We hiked before they were sending up flowers, so we walked a good distance into the preserve without spotting any. We finally found a guy walking his dog who told us where to look for them. They are very low to the ground and very easy to overlook in the grass, but once you train your eyes to spot them you'll likely find dozens of them clustered together right along the trail. 

The picture above shows the challenge of locating the flytraps. They are tiny, no larger than a fingernail. The interior is pale pink, but the outer green blends easily into the numerous small leaves of the low shrubs covering most of the ground. We found that if we spotted moss beds we'd normally find flytraps mixed in. Once you do find one, you'll probably find others no more than a yard away. 

We were there a few weeks before the flytraps bloomed, but here's a stalk of one on the verge of blooming. They should be easy to find when they are flowering. 

The pitcher plants are hard to miss, since they are a few feet tall and fairly colorful. 

The sundews were probably the hardest to find. We only found a few of them at the furthest reaches of the trail where the ground was turning boggy. 

The ecology of this place feels very fragile. It's easy to see how, only a few decades past, development could (and likely did) wipe out whole species on land that the average person might have thought of as a boring patch of earth unworthy of protection. Walking through this landscape, stopping to take in all the rare plants, reminds you that even the most unlikely places can be full of beauty and wonder.