Flowering Season - July-August.
Distribution - Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico and westward. From
Alaska to California. Europe and Asia.

Here is a bloodthirsty little miscreant that lives by reversing
the natural order of higher forms of life preying upon lower
ones, an anomaly in that the vegetable actually eats the animal!
The dogbane, as we have seen, simply catches the flies that dare
trespass upon the butterflies' preserves, for excellent reasons
of its own; the Silenes and phloxes, among others, spread their
calices with a sticky gum that acts as limed twigs do to birds,
in order to guard the nectar secreted for flying benefactors from
pilfering ants; the honey bee being an imported, not a native,
insect, and therefore not perfectly adapted to the milkweed,
occasionally gets entrapped by it; the big bumblebee is sometimes
fatally imprisoned in the moccasin flower's gorgeous tomb - the
punishment of insects that do not benefit the flowers is infinite
in its variety. But the local Venus's flytrap (Dionaea
muscipula), gathered only from the low savannas in North Carolina
to entertain the owners of hothouses as it promptly closes the
crushing trap at the end of its sensitive leaves over a hapless
fly, and the common sundew that tinges the peat-bogs of three
continents with its little reddish leaves, belong to a distinct
class of carnivorous plants which actually masticate their animal
food, depending upon it for nourishment as men do upon cattle
slaughtered in an abattoir. Darwin's luminous account of these
two species alone, which occupies over three hundred absorbingly
interesting pages of his "Insectivorous Plants" should be read by
everyone interested in these freaks of nature.