Pipe Dreams

If I walk slowly through the late summer woods, I can feel the forest around me is charged with an almost supernatural presence. If I look carefully enough, I can see that I’m not alone walking among tiny ghosts that rise up from the forest floor like smoke from an ancient peace pipe. And if I ask nicely, the shy little thieves will reveal themselves and spill their silvery secrets.

Beneath the tree canopy and across the leaf-littered ground sprout delicate white crowns of single-stemmed dainty white flowers; their splendor often overlooked by a mere misclassification as a fungus, a mold, a common mushroom. But when you kneel down beside them and lean in closer, you’ll witness the unfolding of a flower that exists unlike any other and literally and superbly pales in comparison to its green leafy step-sisters.

Monotropa uniflora, which means “a flower once turned,” is likely your favorite flower you never knew existed, and by far the weirdest flower you’ll likely ever meet. Commonly known as “Indian pipes”, “ghost plants”, “ghost flowers”, or “corpse flowers”, Monotropa uniflora thrives in the moist shadows of overgrown ferns, fallen tree trunks, and the shade from overhanging foliage. Completely void of chlorophyll, the non-photosynthetic flower looks down at the earth below, shunning the sunshine and abandoning its reliance on it for energy, going against the very nature of flowerhood that begins and ends with the rays of the sun.

The Indian pipe lives a life of thievery, stealing the sugars and energy she needs from the mycorrhizal fungus that lives in the root zone of the forest ground below. The germinating seedlings trick the fungi by mimicking the root system of a tree, causing the fungi to attach themselves in one of nature’s cleverest forms of identity theft.

Mycorrhizal fungus maintains a symbiotic relationship with nearby trees, attaching themselves to the root systems and causing the tree’s roots to expand, thus able to take in more nutrients and water. In exchange, the tree gives the fungus the carbohydrates it needs to live.

I’m not much of a scientist, though, and when I perceive the Indian pipe, I do so more as a poet. Just the phrase Indian pipe conjures up strange images. Ghost flowers: luminous visions of white crooked wax; ghost plants: tall, transparent stalks spiriting up from a gloomy underworld.

The flowers unfurl up to eight inches in height after a late summer or early fall rain and stay silent and shy with their heads bowed down until fertilization, which then prompts them to turn their faces upwards and open their now discolored petals that have been pinked or purpled by time.

They rot slowly as the mystery pours out of them, but even as they sink into black brittleness, they stand straight like soldiers, still as corpses and motionless in their death dance.

Medicinally, the Indian pipe has been used as an anticonvulsant, analgesic, wart remover, and fever reducer. According to lore, the plant is said to heal the broken heart of those who mourn the loss of a loved one.

The Indian pipe was the favorite flower of poet Emily Dickinson, who often cited its whiteness in her work. It’s my favorite flower as well, though void of color and scent much like a dream, where even in blackness, a flower once turned, a nightmare seed sits inside a swell of summery white smoke.

By Jean Perry

 

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