Fun Facts about Ghost Pipes
- Ghost white: They are plants without green leaves (they have no chlorophyll), but unlike mushrooms, they have flowers (usually small and pink with black markings) on the ends of their stalks.
- Pipe shape: Healthy plants have a pipe-like candy-cane shape, with thin albino stalks and bonnet-like drooping heads. As they mature, the stalks straighten and flowers point toward the sky. In a month or less, the stalks shrivel into thin brownish sticks. Other names for this plant are Indian pipes and ghost flower.
- Grow in the dark: Ghost pipes thrive in the dense shade of the forest floor. They are flowers that don’t need sunlight, as they do not produce their own food through photosynthesis as most plants do.
- Bouquets for zombies: Ghost pipes are scavengers and feed off of mushrooms (mycorrhizal fungi) in the soil. Other plants that use this same strategy include: pine-sap, squawroot and beech-drop.
- Poet’s flower: the Ghost pipe was one of Emily Dickinson’s favorite flowers and appeared on the cover of her first collection of poetry, published posthumously in 1890.
