Indian Pipe is up. In clusters it punches through the soil, at first glimpse the pallid knuckles of a bony fist. Yet fully emerged the plant is described as fleshy--fleshy as a mushroom, I think. Appearing fungal, Indian Pipe is a wildflower devoid of chlorophyll, with only vestigial leaves along the stem that look like a newborn's translucent peeling skin. It is more colorless-if one can say that--than a cave cricket.
The stem and leaves, the sepals, petals, and stamens of its single nodding flower: all have the same ghostly look. If the fog that rises from a snowy farm-field on a humid, cool midwestern morning took on a bodily form, this would be it. Pick Indian Pipe, also known as Corpse-Plant, and it turns black. It is the kind of flower Morticia, from The Adams Family, might rear, though transplanting is difficult due to the plant's parasitic relationship with a tree-root fungus--its sole method of obtaining nutrients.
Rarely, Indian Pipe's stem will be run through with a pale pink like the blood that shows beneath your fingernails when you clutch something. One wonders what might have been said, here in the darkest part of the forest, to make this icy flower blush like this.
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