This Week's Mystery Plant

It's a long time until Halloween, but here's a spooky little plant. This is actually one of the most common wildflowers in eastern North America. It grows all the way out to the west coast, mostly skipping the southwestern states. (You could also find it in parts of South America and Asia.) It is fond of very shady forests. In South Carolina, it occurs commonly in every county, blooming in humus-rich soil early in the autumn. It is a member of a very specialized family, related to rhododendrons and blueberries.

This is a plant that might look more like some sort of fungus than a flowering herb. Its stems are pale and waxy, usually white, but sometime pink or even bluish…and the plants themselves feel a bit cool and clammy. If you pick one of these ghostly plants in the forest, it will soon turn black. There are only non-functional, scale-like leaves up and down the stem, which may be up to 10" or so tall. At the top of each stem is a single flower, and despite the weird nature of this species, its flowers are rather straightforward, bearing stamens and a pistil within. The flower itself, though, droops when young, and so the entire plant looks a bit like a dropped pipe, standing on end. Following pollination, the flower develops a capsule, and during this process, erects itself until it is pointing straight up. (The species name, which means "once-turning", alludes to this peculiar movement.) As you might expect, this bizarre little thing has enjoyed a reputation as a medicinal plant, even featuring some magic qualities.

Our amazing little friend contains no chlorophyll, so it cannot produce its own food. Well, that is certainly odd for most plants, but in this very specialized case, it is par for the course: this species is probably parasitic on the roots of nearby trees for its nourishment. Its roots are also closely associated with various fungi which, in a complicated manner, probably make food absorption easier. (Photo by Linda Lee.)

Photo by Linda Lee