Indian Pipe

[Maggie]

This is out of range of the WV (found on a back street of Lincoln City, by the abandoned Taft Grade School), but I am reading that this species is widespread.  Interesting plant to look for.  (If it is not Monotropa Uniflora, someone let me know please....)

[Lisa Millbank]

Hi Maggie,

It's awesome to see Indian Pipe flowers forcing their way out of the
ground like that; they are truly weird plants. Although they are called
"saprophytes" in many older reference books, that term implied that
Indian Pipe was somehow able to break down organic matter and draw out
nutrients from it. It can't actually do that, but it turns out that it
parasitizes some of the fungi in the family Russulaceae (which entwine
themselves with tree roots in a mutually beneficial way; a mycorrhizal
network). So the Indian Pipe is a mycoheterotroph, a parasite that gets
just about all its nutrients from the fungus-tree system. I always
wondered if it gets a lot of its water that way as well, since it always
seems to look fresh and juicy despite pushing its way up through fairly
dry soil.

If anyone wants to look for these plants locally, a couple of years ago
there were a half-dozen or so clumps of these flowers pushing out of the
soil along the trail in the NW part of Chip Ross Park in Corvallis.
They seemed to be in an unusual setting (not in the shady depths of an
old conifer forest).

Lisa Millbank
www.neighborhood-naturalist.com

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