Seattle
Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora) is one of the strange plants. It lives in the darkest places in the forest, has no chlorophyll, finds nourishment through an intermediary relationship with fungi that somehow connect it to the roots of surrounding trees. It blooms only after it has stored enough energy to sustain itself after the production of stem, flower and seed.
2007. Mid July. When I saw them huddled under the Salal I could only stare, gape mouthed. These were not something you would find in an urban forest, even one that had survived virtually untouched since the last glaciers melted north. They were too weird, too untamed, a herd of ghost horses rearing from the forest floor in freeze-frame stampede.
Indian Pipe
2008. June. I checked under the Salal every day from the first of the month. On the 23rd I found these.
June 23, 2008.
By the 9th of July they looked like this.
July 9, 2008.
Nine days later their blossoms had begun to fade.
July 18, 2008.
Their skeletons survived the winter.
2009. Perhaps a half dozen plants emerged from the soil in late June. A week later every one of them had been sheared off at soil level. Under a hand lens the sheared stems showed nibble marks. Mice? Voles? The best guess from the Parks people and the local naturalists was that the culprit was one of the introduced slugs, perhaps the same species that had been the bane of any attempt to reintroduce Skunk Cabbage to the restored wetlands in the forest.
2010. No Indian Pipe grew under the Salal.
2011. I'm an optimist. I've checked under the Salal again this year every day since early June. I'm not sure how disappointing it would be if Indian Pipe were never to appear again in the forest. I've seen its strange beauty there, and am more for the experience. The thing is, this little fragment of the city's original ecosystem is so fragile and under so much pressure, from increased visitor traffic and introduced critters and all of the things that go along with our hurly burly lives. These plants may well be the intermediaries between the wildness that held the forest in the too recent past and a time when we grieve for what we don't know that we've lost.
July 6, 2011. New Indian Pipe has reared up from the duff under the Salal. They are later than in previous years, and are so few.
July 15, 2011. One of the new plants has been sheared off at soil level, but another is just beginning to emerge from the forest floor.
July 15, 2011.
July 22, 2011. Six stems remain. These Indian Pipe seems to be hanging on.
July 22, 2011. A small stand of Indian Pipe is maturing under the Salal.