Leaves: None. Roots: A mass of brittle fibers, from
which usually a cluster of several white scapes arises. Fruit: A
5-valved, many-seeded, erect capsule.
Preferred Habitat - Heavily shaded, moist, rich woods, especially
under oak and pine trees.
Flowering Season - June-August.
Distribution - Almost throughout temperate North America.
Colorless in every part, waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes
rise like a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them
well. Ghoulish parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted
roots prey either on the juices of living plants or on the
decaying matter of dead ones, how weirdly beautiful and
decorative, they are! The strange plant grows also in Japan, and
one can readily imagine how fascinated the native artists must be
by its chaste charms.
Yet to one who can read the faces of flowers, as it were, it
stands a branded sinner. Doubtless its ancestors were
industrious, honest creatures, seeking their food in the soil,
and digesting it with the help of leaves filled with good green
matter (chlorophyll) on which virtuous vegetable life depends;
but some ancestral knave elected to live by piracy, to drain the
already digested food of its neighbors; so the Indian pipe
gradually lost the use of parts for which it had need no longer,
until we find it today without color and its leaves degenerated
into mere scaly bracts.
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