Ghosts of the Bayou

  While it seems a bit late to be talking of ghosts on the Bayou since Halloween was two weeks ago, they are here.  Ghosts!  On the Bayou!  Actually, I am speaking of a find in the back yard.  I am always on the lookout for something a tad unusual and this morning I found it.  Mark and I were heading to the store when I spied my treasure.  As he was backing the truck out of the driveway, my eyes picked up on a small plant under the azalea bushes.  Aha!  Ghost plants!  I knew then that I would be taking pictures while out in the rain on this cold day.  In fact, I could not concentrate on our shopping trip because my brain kept flitting back to beneath the bushes!

  Ghost plants used to be thought of as a type of mushroom but recently it was discovered that they were indeed plants not fungi.  Besides the ghost plant name, these things go by Indian pipes, corpse plants or ice plants.  These are all due to their appearance.  They do have one of those unpronounceable names...Monotropa uniflora.  Ghost plants are plants but do not have chlorophyll nor do they get their energy from the sun.  Usually, these plants are found on the forest floor where it is rather dark (hence under my azalea bushes which are under oak trees).  They are parasitic in that they draw nutrients from other living things.  In the ghost plants case, they do this in sort of a weird way.  A fungus wraps its mycella around the roots of a nearby tree.  This relationship is good for the two as the fungus draws nutrients from the tree while the tree gets extra moisture from the fungus.  Then along comes the ghost plant.  It is a grand thief!  It taps its roots into the mycella and steals nutrients from both the fungus and the tree! 

  I have always found the plants to be quite interesting.  Granddad was the first to introduce them to me so many years ago.  He called them Indian pipes and told me that they were mushrooms. He also told me of the other names.  I was allowed to choose my favorite so they became known as ghost plants from that day forward.   Come to think of it, our first sighting of the plants was just about in this very spot over fifty years ago!