Indian Pipe

While I was concentrating on the forest floor to photograph the orchids pictured here recently I also noticed another favorite plant that doesn't mind the darkness beneath the big trees near Matheson Lake. This is an emerging clump of Indian Pipe, a fascinating plant that, like the orchids, has no chlorophyll and gets it nourishment from its relationship with a fungus.

Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora)

A few years ago I triumphantly posted a photo of my first sighting of the ghostly white saprophyte known as Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora). I've seen them a half dozen times since when walking in the forest but until sharp-eyed Fern spotted these yesterday I had not seen them at this stage of their development. Now the flowers no longer face downwards but have gone to seed and turned upwards. These were sighted near the summit of Mount Newton in East Saanich.

Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora)

The wonderfully strange and ghostly plant above is commonly called Indian Pipe, Ghost Plant or Corpse Plant (Monotropa uniflora) and it has long been number 1 on my list of wildflowers I want to see. So I am sharing this photo with you today with a definite sense of satisfaction since I first encountered these in a forest near Victoria yesterday. Despite their appearance they are NOT a kind of fungi or mushroom. They are a flowering plant that lives from decaying plant matter rather than through the use of chlorophyll and photosynthesis. When I wander around in the forest I am usually looking for something specific because that provides a focus. Yesterday I was hoping to encounter a deer because, though I have seen several this year, I have not yet photographed one. I was also glancing around on the lookout for local orchids and for Indian Pipe, without much hope of seeing the latter because the forest floor where I was walking was quite well lighted and I had always pictured this plant as growing in the dimness beneath a dense rain forest canopy. Suddenly I saw one poking up above the moss. Then I saw the rest and realized I was in the midst of a grove of them, dozens of them all around me.

---

ps: I DID see a deer later - but that's tomorrow's photo.