Expert: Christopher Littrell - 7/16/2007

Question
Hello I live in oregon and I was wondering about the enviroment the plant would be in. Would be ok if the plant is left to live outside. Oregon is mostly rainy and not very humid and is kinda cold. Would this be ok for the fly trap or should I make it an inside home? Any thing is helpful. And please if you can recomend any other web sites that focus on the VFT please let me know. It would be rather helpful, I'm learning.

Answer
Hello Robert,

Venus Flytraps are North American plants from the East Coast in the North Carolina bog. They can tolerate a wide range of temperatures and are designated as zone 8 plants, able to survive freezing winters and hot summers. Humidity is not very important for Flytrap health. As a matter of fact, Sarracenia Northwest, the top experts here, own a carnivorous plant nursery where they grow all their stock of North American plants, including their Venus Flytraps, outside. They are based in Oregon. You can visit their website at cobraplant.com for details on how they grow their plants outdoors. Whenever possible, it is best to place North American plants outside for full sun living, however; make sure you do so slowly, giving the plant more intense light each week for 2-3 weeks before placing it in full intensity sun as they need to develop resistance to UV radiation. Just place the plant in a direct sun morning window one week, a all day direct sun window the next, and ouside after that. The plant will experience some leaf burn, but it's new leaves will be fully resistant to sunlight and it will grow faster and more brightly colored. If you bought the plant with a humidity dome, you can also get rid of the dome with a similarly slow approach by propping one side of the dome up a fraction of an inch and continuously raising it a bit (1/4-1/2 inche)every 3 days on each side until it is held up over 2 inches. By that time it should not hold humidity at all and can be removed after about two weeks. The plant will then be adapted to your area's humidity. It will grow waxier, tougher leaves and they will be much stronger than leaves of plants grown under humidity domes.

Adrian Slack wrote a book called Insect-Eating Plants & How to Grow Them.

Pietropaolo wrote a book called The World of Carnivorous Plants.

Peter D'Amato wrote a more recent book called Savage Garden.

If you want to learn more about carnivorous plants those books will help as will the Sarracenia Northwest website.

I do not know of a specific website on just Venus Flytraps, but there probably are some out there created by individual growers, but each individual might have different ideas about how to grow them in specific conditions that might not relate to your situation.

Keep up the research,

Christopher