The Plant That Never Made a Leaf

It was standing in pine duff, about knee high, and the first thing I noticed was that it was the wrong color. A red stalk, hairy and slightly sticky, hung with small yellow bells like something out of a garden. The second thing I noticed was that it had no leaves. Not small ones, not dried ones. None.

Woodland pinedrops doesn't have leaves because it has no use for them. It contains no chlorophyll at all — no green anywhere on it, at any point in its life — which means it has never once made its own food. Every calorie in that stalk came from somewhere else.

The route it takes is worth understanding, because it isn't as simple as robbing the tree. 

Underground, a pine's roots are wrapped in fungus. That's normal, and it's a fair trade: the fungus supplies the tree with phosphorus and nitrogen, and the mass of fungal threads below ground greatly extends how much water the tree can reach, and the tree pays in sugar it made in the needles. Most trees grow very poorly, if at all, without it.

Pinedrops plugs into the middle of it. Its roots tap that fungus — false-truffles in the genus Rhizopogon — and pull sugar off the line. The tree made it. The fungus was carrying it. Pinedrops takes it without contributing to either end. In fairness, some researchers looking at how the plant's roots branch have wondered whether it gives something back we haven't identified yet. For now, it looks like a freeloader on somebody else's honest business.

Which brings me to the part I find hardest to stop thinking about.

The seeds are almost nothing — dust, with a net-like wing at one end of each minute seed that carries it to a new site as it's sprinkled from the capsule. The plant makes an enormous number of them. And a pinedrops seed won't germinate at all unless it detects a chemical signal from that same fungus. Tested against six other groups of basidiomycetes, the seeds failed to germinate; only Rhizopogon triggered them — and even in the lab with the right fungus present, germination ran between zero and thirteen percent.

So every one of those seeds is looking for one thing, and it can't see. It has to be blown to ground where that exact fungus is already living under the right kind of tree, and even then the odds are poor. Nearly all of them land somewhere and simply never become anything.

The stalk grows for only one year, but stands as a dried stalk for several more — holding its empty capsules above the duff, still shaking out dust that mostly won't take.

It isn't a pretty flower that happened to grow in the woods. It's a specialist playing a long, narrow game, and the fact that you found one standing there means it already won.