Kingdom: Plantae (Plants)

(Unranked): Angiosperms

(Unranked): Eudicots

(Unranked): Core Eudicots

Order: Caryophyllales

Family: Droseraceae

Genus: Drosera

Drosera, usually famous as the sundews, encompasses one of the biggest varieties of carnivorous plants, having over 194 species. The members of Droseraceae family attract, arrest, and absorb insects through stalked mucilaginous glands spread over the surface of their leaves. The insects go to enrich the meager mineral nutrition of the soil wherein they grow. You can see a variety of these species, having a large variety of form and size growing natively on all continents but in Antarctica.

Distribution

The variety of the sundew genus extends from Alaska in the north to New Zealand in the south. It is in Australia that you find the dense concentration of these species, accounting for nearly fifty percent of all known varieties, with South America and southern Africa, each having over 20 species. Large parts of Eurasia and North America also account for a few varieties

Anatomy

Most sundews are perennial, though rare varieties are annual. These herbaceous plants form prostrate or straight rosettes with heights varying from 0.4 to 39 inches, depending on the variety. The climbing variety appears in the form of mixed-up stems that can reach the height of ten feet as happens with D. Erythrogyne.

Habit

You can specify the species under among many forms of growth, including Temperate Sundews, Pygmy sundews, Subtropical sundews, and the Petiolaris complex.

Reproduction

Many types of sundews are self-productive as their flowers often self-pollinate upon closing. In some species, vegetative reproduction crops up naturally producing stolons, and in some other species, the reproduction happens when roots reach closer to the soil surface.

Habitat

Sundew plant Drosera normally grows in seasonally moist habitats or places that are not continually wet, where the soil has acidic content and the levels of sunlight are high. Accordingly, you can find them in the swamps, marshes, fens, bogs and moist steam banks in the wallums of coastal Australia (an ecosystem of coastal south-east Queensland, extending into north-eastern New South Wales), the tepuis of Venezuela (table-top mountain) and the fynbos of South Africa(in the Western Cape of South Africa)