A parasitic flower

Although it grows in a wide range in Asia, North American, and northern South America, you might not easily find a Monotropa uniflora, a wildflower also known as a ghost pipe or Indian pipe. The bare stems rise less than a foot tall, often in dark spots. They look like a weird mushroom or fungus, but they are true flowering plants, related to blueberries and rhododendra.

However, they’re parasites. They have no green chlorophyl. Instead of making their own food, they get their food from fungus, and that fungus gets its food from photosynthetic trees over mycorrhizal networks.

Plants employ many strategies to survive, and they can co-relate in many ways, among them: mutualism (mutual dependence), commensalism (a plant benefits from another but doesn’t do it harm), parasitism (a plant benefits from another and does harm it), amensalism (a plant benefits from another and destroys it), and carnivorism (a plant consumes an animal). Is being a parasite so bad, given some of the other choices?

Ghost pipes were Emily Dickinson’s favorite flower: “I still cherish the clutch with which I bore it from the ground when a wondering child, an unearthly booty, and maturity only enhances the mystery, never decreases it.”

I took the photo of those ghost pipes at the Dells of Eau Claire Park in Marathon County, Wisconsin. If you’re ever in the neighborhood, stop by and take a hike. The park along the Eau Claire River, including a waterfall, is gorgeous. (Here’s another photo I took there.)

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The trade paperback edition of my novel Dual Memory comes out on April 16 and is available for pre-order from your favorite bookseller. Hardcover, ebook, and audiobook editions are also available.

The third book in the Semiosis trilogy, Usurpation, will be published in October this year, and you can pre-order it with links to your favorite bookseller here, in hardcover and ebook.