This waxy, cold and clammy plant is white throughout —
stalks, scales, and flowers — only the eight or ten yellowish
stamens giving a faint touch of colour to its ghost-like ap-
pearance. Very rarely the Indian Pipe is rose-colour, and
always it turns blackish when dying. Of all ghoulish para-
sites the Monotropas are among the worst, their matted,
brittle, fibrous roots preying on the juices of other plants, or
on dead and decaying matter. The single, bell-shaped
flower hangs its head at the top of each scaly stalk, but when
the numerous seeds begin to form it raises its head erect.
Monotropa Hypopitys, or Pinesap, has white, tawny or
rose-coloured flowers that are very fragrant, and oblong-
bell-shaped, borne in a one-sided, terminal, drooping raceme,
and, like the Indian Pipe, becoming erect at maturity. The
scaly-bracted scapes rise in clusters from a mass of fleshy,



PLATE XXXVIII



Indian Pipe
{Monotropa vniHora)



178 White to Green and Brown Flowers

fibrous roots, the bracts very densely imbricated at the base
of the peduncles, and, together with the preceding species,
the Pinesap is branded as a parasite by the loss of all leaves
and chlorophyll.
PINE DROPS

Pterospora Andromedea. Heath Family

Stems: scape bracted, grooved, densely covered with viscid hairs.
Leaves: none, bracts lanceolate or linear, very numerous, crowded at
the base. Flowers: numerous, racemose. Fruit: capsule globose-
ovoid, tapering, with a reticulated broad wing.
The roots of this parasitic plant are extremely astringent
and form a thick fibrous mass, often two feet in diameter.
