Once the world discovers you know something about nature, the questions never end. Odd phone calls come from people you’ve never met asking about the identity of this or that plant or animal that they have found growing in the yard or terrorizing their livestock. Friends approach, and, holding a wilted leaf, will ask how to control a particular invasive species. Or they might launch into a description of something that turns out to be a rotting apple, a woolly oak gall or a doggy-chewed tennis ball. In social gatherings, nature writers can be cornered as often as doctors for information.
On such occasions, I can’t think of a native plant that I’ve been queried about more than the familiar “Indian pipe” and its near look-alike, “pinesap.” The white stems of Indian pipe are so pale that the plant has earned the apt monikers of “ghost plant,” “ghost pipe,” “ice plant” and, my favorite, “corpse plant.” The narrow stems, which can grow to 10 inches tall, are layered with unusual scale-like leaves.
Indian pipe is as widespread as it is enigmatic. Clumps of the pallid stems push up though rotting leaves in moist woodlands throughout North America. And although it has an exotic appearance, it is in the heath family, which also include more traditional-looking plants, such as blueberry, cranberry, azalea and rhododendron plants.
At the tip of each stem, Indian pipe grows a waxy, inch-long flower bearing four-to-five small petals. Young flowers face earthward on the end of down-turned stalks. This familiar silhouette reminded colonists of the ceremonial pipes or calumets of New England’s indigenous cultures. Indeed the Abenakis of New Hampshire and Vermont noticed this similarity long ago and named the plant odamÔganiz, or “a little pipe.”
Flowers appear on this perennial from June through September and are a source of nectar for bumblebees. Once the young flowers become pollinated and begin to form seeds, they turn up to face the sun. This habit gave rise to the Latin name of Monotropa (“once-turned”) uniflora (“one-flowered.”)
Although “fairy smoke,” as it sometimes also called, lacks chlorophyll and can’t create food energy from sunlight, it is a true flowering plant. The silken white flowers are so bright that they almost appear radiant in the shadowy woodlands where they grow.
While they don’t glow in the dark, as some people believe, Indian pipe can grow in the dark—because it absorbs its needed energy from the fungi in a rich forest floor. The fungi that Indian pipes parasitize are called mycorrhizal fungi and they have a mutually beneficial relationship with many tree species. The tree roots are penetrated by fungal threads and pass water and carbohydrates to the fungi. In turn, the fungal threads expand the root’s ability to absorb nutrients from the soil.
In this intricate nutrient exchange, Indian pipe parasitizes the fungi, the Russula and Lactarius mushrooms that are involved in the mutually beneficial relationships with tree roots. This relationship has been explored by botanists who have devised experiments that treated the sugars in trees with radioactive isotopes, and who then traced the passage of these sugars from the tree roots, though the mycorrhizal fungi and into the parasitic Indian pipes. So the fungi inadvertently act as surrogate nutrient thieves for the pilfering pipes.
Just as interesting, perhaps, is a close relative of Indian pipe, the pinesap, which inhabits the acid soils of our pine and oak forests. In his book, “A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm,” Edwin Way Teale describes an encounter with pinesap as like coming “upon clumps of Indian pipes that, instead of being waxy ghostly white, are a beautiful shade of pink, sometimes with the color even deepening into red.”
Pinesap, which has the Latin name, Monotropa hypopithys (“under pines”), bears clusters of from three to 10, cream-to-lavender-colored flowers on fuzzy stems that are pale pink or sometimes even yellowish. The delicate, one-half inch blossoms are bell-shaped. Roots of pinesap parasitize Tricholoma, another mycorrhizal fungi.
If you should encounter Indian pipe or pinesap on your next woodland foray, you may be tempted to pick a few and bring them home for a closer look. But resist the urge, because neither is a keeper. Soon after being picked, they wither and turn black. Nature’s mysterious ghost plants are best appreciated when left undisturbed to thrive in their own native haunts.