Faint Flowers

During my wanderings through the surrounding woods over the years, I usually carry a camera with me, to take advantage of the varied displays that Mother Nature provides. Not only do I get some memorable photos, but the experience can lead to a fascinating lesson on yet another aspect of the natural world. I often get intrigued enough about something I see and photograph to go back home and do some explorations on the internet and learn some things I never knew existed.

The example I have in mind at the moment is the discovery today of the name of what I thought was a mushroom but turns out to be an albino flowering plant. I discovered this curiosity a few years ago, during a rainy spring, when mushrooms were popping up everywhere. (See photo below.) This guy had a very different appearance—more like a flower than a mushroom. Rather than a stalk topped by a button or a flared bonnet, as mushrooms typically appear, these had pure white bell-like blossoms. Since they were sprouting up through a layer of wet leaves like the mushrooms surrounding them, I assumed they must be a mushroom. Wrong. It’s a plant.

I tried identifying the thing in my mushroom field guide, with no success. (Well, the book is about mushrooms, not flowers.) I had no idea what it really was, so was stumped. I couldn’t Google it by doing a search on the words “White, stalky, mushroomy thing.” Sometime after that I was watching a video outtake of Walt Disney’s 1940 movie “Fantasia” and saw this little white thing, during a scene in the forest. There it was! But since Walt never labeled his shrooms or plants, I remained stumped.

Over the last few years the photos of this albino thing sat in the bowels of my computer—seemingly destined to remain a mystery. Perseverance sometimes pays off, however. While reading a recent Washington Post comics section, the “Mark Trail” comic strip finally offered me a solution: it’s the Indian pipe plant! Its scientific name (thanks to Wikipedia) is Monotropa uniflora—the uniflora part indicating that each stem bears a single flower. It’s also called the “ghost plant” and the “corpse plant.” (Yuck!) 

So, it’s a plant and not a mushroom! Then how come it’s white? Don’t plants have to be green? Green chlorophyll is what allows a plant to transform the sun’s radiant energy into sugar for their food.

Well, yes, a plant does require the action of chlorophyll for its nutrients, but in the case of the Indian pipe plant it does so secondarily… or, more appropriately, “tertiarily.” The Indian pipe gets its nutrients from its surrounding mushroom pals—it literally is a parasite, feeding off the mushrooms that grow in a symbiotic fashion with tree roots. 

The mushroom itself (actually the underground mycelium part of it) acquires its carbohydrates (its sugars) from the tree’s photosynthesis work (all food starts with photosynthesis!). In return, the mushroom provides the tree roots with much-needed phosphorous, a nutrient that it cannot absorb on its own. The Indian pipe—not a part of this nutrient symbiotic exchange—also enjoys the carbs that the tree makes, by parasitizing the mushroom (by stealing some of the mushroom’s food). So what does the pipe plant offer in return? I don’t know. Maybe that’s next month’s research task. Maybe its dead body (remember it’s also called the corpse plant) feeds nutrients back to the tree? There’s gotta be a reason… there’s no free lunch, after all.

This is a wonderful example of a mutually beneficial underground society. It’s a fascinating example of the marvelous, complex, intertwined web that nature has created. So why is the plant called the Indian pipe? It seems to bear a resemblance to the Native American peace pipe, according to the authoritative “Mark Trail.”