Ghosts In the Forest

GHOSTS IN THE FOREST

Wednesday, August 15, 2007 (Napanee Beaver)

Friday, August 17, 2007 (Picton Gazette)

It was pinesap we were now staring at, tucked under a conifer near its base where the trail makes its final turn before heading back to the parking lot. The H.R. Frink Centre, at Plainfield, is well known for its little perks along the trails, and this was one of them. True to form, these pinesaps were growing where they were supposed to be.

At first, we thought they were the similar Indian pipes that seem to be turning up everywhere this summer. I came across several patches of them in a dense deciduous woods at Morrison’s Point some weeks ago, and others growing at the Sidney Conservation Area near Stirling. However, these we were now hovering over, were different. Unlike the ghostly white Indian pipes, these were pale yellow, and unlike the Indian pipe that bears one flower per stem, these contained several. They seemed to bend under the sheer weight of them all.

These unusual plants are truly the “ghost flowers” of our woodlands. They have no recognizable leaves, they have no colour for they have no chlorophyll, and they don’t even have true roots. No, they are not a fungus, although superficially, they may resemble one. You will find them in most wildflower guides, although to survive, they do not function like most other plants that can be found in the identification guide. Instead, they depend on a symbiotic relationship with other forest dwellers in order to survive.

These plants long ago lost their ability to photosynthesize and have become totally dependent on other organisms. They require fungi to survive. If you want the technical side of it, they are obligate myco-heterotrophs. That is just a complicated way of saying they require mycorhizal fungi to gather their food, and subsequently spoon feed them. What are mycorhizal fungi? Simply put, they are those species that do live symbiotically with plant species that do contain chlorophyll. Forming dense nets of fungal hairs around the roots of plants, they send their threadlike mushroom “roots” called mycellium great distances where they gather nutrients and water. They share these products with the plants they have partnered with, and as a trade-off sugars are given by the plants to the fungi, allowing both to survive a little easier than they could if they were apart. In fact, fungi, it would seem, are not always the parasites that many would have us believe them to be. May plants require the presence of fungi to survive. The Douglas firs of the Pacific area, are a good example, requiring fungal symbionts to live. Many plants need these fungal partners.

For the pinesaps and Indian pipes though, it is a one way street of taking what they can get from the fungi, but really having nothing in return to give back.

Well, at least, that is what we were trained to think when we took all this stuff in high school biology. However, recent research in the world is upsetting this simplistic view. Some scientists feel that these chlorophyll starved plants actually stimulate their fungal partners into increased growth, subsequently promoting a much higher nutrient absorption by the trees that are symbiotically attached to the fungus. It’s still all rudimentary at this stage, but the evidence seems to point toward pinesaps and Indian pipes, indirectly, being fertilizer factories.

My first introduction to these unusual non green plants was during my first day on the job as a park naturalist at Sandbanks Provincial Park. I came across a growth of something rather grotesque along the Cedar Sands Trail which my supervisor told me were coral-root. Only coral-root are not members of the wintergreen family like the pinesaps and Indian pipes. They are, in fact, orchids, and like the pinesaps and Indian pipes, lack green pigment and bear their flowers on leafless stalks. There was a cluster as I recall and the “flowers” were as nondescript in colour as the stems themselves.

There are also members of the Broomrape family that similarly fall into the non green plant category – beechdrops and one-flowered cancer-root. No doubt there are other such plants in our midst that carry on in similar fashion, depending on other organisms to survive.

We left the pinesap that day, as we found it – a cluster of short, erect scaley stems, so delicate as if to disintegrate with the first breeze that might find its way through the conifers. Its colour, what there was to show, will turn black once its life is over, and the tiny bouquet we found will melt into the forest litter. A totally genetically different species of pinesap may spring up here in the fall, or somewhere else nearby, and its colour will be more of a reddish.

Certainly interesting little flowers to be on the lookout for the next time you are walking through the woods. However, the conditions have to be just right, as after nearly a lifetime underground, they spring through the soil surface only when all systems are go – and that would certainly seem to be right now.