_Monotropa uniflora_
_Flowers_--Solitary, smooth, waxy, white (rarely pink), oblong
bell-shaped, nodding from the tip of a fleshy, white, scaly scape 4 to
10 in. tall. Calyx of 2 to 4 early-falling white sepals; 4 or 5 oblong,
scale-like petals; 8 or 10 tawny, hairy stamens; a 5-celled, egg-shaped
ovary, narrowed into the short, thick style. _Leaves:_ None. _Roots:_ A
mass of brittle fibres, from which usually a cluster of several white
scapes arises. _Fruit:_ A 5-valved, many-seeded, erect capsule.
_Preferred Habitat_--Heavily shaded, moist, rich woods, especially under
oak and pine trees.
_Flowering Season_--June-August.
_Distribution_--Almost throughout temperate North America.
Colorless in every part, waxy, cold, and clammy, Indian pipes rise like
a company of wraiths in the dim forest that suits them well. Ghoulish
parasites, uncanny saprophytes, for their matted roots prey either on
the juices of living plants or on the decaying matter of dead ones, how
weirdly beautiful and decorative they are! The strange plant grows also
in Japan, and one can readily imagine how fascinated the native artists
must be by its chaste charms.
Yet to one who can read the faces of flowers, as it were, it stands a
branded sinner. Doubtless its ancestors were industrious, honest
creatures, seeking their food in the soil, and digesting it with the
help of leaves filled with good green matter (chlorophyll) on which
virtuous vegetable life depends; but some ancestral knave elected to
live by piracy, to drain the already digested food of its neighbors; so
the Indian Pipe gradually lost the use of parts for which it has need no
longer, until we find it to-day without color and its leaves degenerated
into mere scaly bracts. Nature had manifold ways of illustrating the
parable of the ten pieces of money. Spiritual law is natural law: “From
him that hath not, even that he hath shall be taken away.” Among plants
as among souls, there are all degrees of backsliders. The foxglove,
which is guilty of only sly, petty larceny, wears not the equivalent of
the striped suit and the shaved head; nor does the mistletoe, which
steals crude food from the tree, but still digests it itself, and is
therefore only a dingy yellowish green. Such plants, however, as the
broom-rape, Pine Sap, beech-drops, the Indian Pipe, and the
dodder--which marks the lowest stage of degradation of them all--appear
among their race branded with the mark of crime as surely as was Cain.
No wonder this degenerate hangs its head; no wonder it grows black with
shame on being picked, as if its wickedness were only just then
discovered! To think that a plant related on one side to many of the
loveliest flowers in Nature’s garden--the azaleas, laurels,
rhododendrons, and the bonny heather--and on the other side to the
modest but no less charming wintergreen tribe, should have fallen from
grace to such a depth! Its scientific name, meaning a flower once
turned, describes it during only a part of its career. When the minute,
innumerable seeds begin to form, it proudly raises its head erect, as if
conscious that it had performed the one righteous act of its life.