#coralroot

[greycatbird]

Rocky Mountain National Park there ain't nothing else like you

[virtual-boy]

{🪻}{🪻}{🪻} {🦋}{🦋}{🦋} {🔮}{🔮}{🔮}

"I'm in full bloom."

jinkx monsoon's rupaul's drag race all stars 7 "veiled it" runway stimboard with lavender stims!

[kay-outside]

Coralroot seasonnnnnnn 😍

[seabeck]

Check this out! It’s a parasitic orchid, they parasitize mushroom mycelium because they dont produce chlorophyll

[geopsych]

Before I get to the fungus (and I will!), here’s my most exciting find of the day, although not the most beautiful picture. I had been told years ago that there were at least 6 orchids in the area I go to for photos, but over the years since then I’ve only found 4. But today I saw this nondescript stem standing lit up among the shadows of the woods. I thought it might be beechdrops but it wasn’t. The only other possibility was some species of coralroot, which is an orchid, and upon doing some searches I find that’s what it is! Autumn coralroot. I thought it was finished blooming but it turns out sometimes this is all it does because it’s (nsfw!) self-pollinating. I wish I had taken more pictures but I was sort of in a mushroom trance (not the kind where you eat them, but just from seeing so many) at the time.  I’m not sure I could find it again. I had wandered off the trail and only noticed it because the sun was hitting it right then. So this may not look like much but I haven’t been this jazzed about something for a while. New orchid. Yay!

[lazyevaluationranch]

7/5/2020 Frantically assembling a beehive today. Concrete pad for the hive hasn't cracked, yet. Two days until Surprise Bees.

It has been four years since I last posted about the Leafless Underground Parasitic Orchids. They live entirely underground, pale and strange, except once a year for about a week they reach up into the air to flower and spread.

In these four years we moved to a new country, lived in a one-room apartment in the city where the streetlights come in the window and touch your face at night, and moved to a tiny island. This is our third spring on the island.

A single Leafless Underground Parasitic Orchid has shown up at the new place somehow. It would like me to remind you: the Leafless Underground Parasitic Orchids are not at all totally creepy, they are not listening to you through the floors right now, and you should definitely continue about your oblivious surface business in the shallow rind of air above the silent sea of hungry earth.

I have never been so happy to be stalked by Totally Not Creepy Plants.

[robotblues]

Spotted coralroot,  Corallorhiza maculata, Olympia, WA

[mountrainiernps]

If you’ve visited some of the lower-elevation areas of the park lately, such as Ohanapecosh or Longmire, you may have noticed some beautiful but odd-looking plants growing along the trails. These plants, which go by such colorful names as candystick, pinesap, and coralroots, lack leaves or chlorophyll, and are known as “mycoheterotrophs.” Mycoheterotrophs are plants that don’t create any of their own energy, instead taking their food from the vast fungal networks beneath the forest floor. As the fungus gets nothing in return, these flowers are an uncommon example of plants acting as a parasite on a fungus, rather than the other way around! 

Since they don’t require sunlight, these plants are able to thrive in the deep shade of the forest floor. Although they may look and act similarly, many of these species are quite distantly related to one another – some are in the orchid family, while others are in the same family as huckleberries and azaleas (Ericaceae)! Though the giant trees of the old-growth forest get lots of well-deserved attention, these plants are a good reminder to look down as well.

_____ NPS/ B. Silver-Bates photos:  (top) Candystick (Allotropa virgata), slender red-and-white plants covered in small flowers emerging from the forest floor.

(bottom left) Pacific Coralroot (Corallorhiza mertensiana), a small magenta orchid in front of a decaying log.

(bottom right) Pinesap (Monotropa hypopytis), a pinkish plant covered in bell-shaped white flowers emerging from the forest floor.

~bsb/kl