Week 41: Ghost Pipe (Emily Dickinson, Merlin Sheldrake)

Fig. 1. Indian Pipe (Monotropa uniflora) (1926) Mary Vaux Walcott. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

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Headnote#

I felt nearly obligated, given the time of year, to dedicate this week’s entry to the venerable pumpkin, that special gourd so eternally loved and multifariously depicted by Yayoi Kusama (may she rest in peace). But in the spirit of veering, I present instead a more mysterious offering: a non-photosynthesizing parasite nonetheless described by Emily Dickinson as “the preferred flower of life.”

Enter the ghost pipe (Monotropa uniflora), also called by many other tantalizing names: ghost flower, Indian pipe, Dutchman’s pipe, American iceplant, corpse plant (not to be confused with the iconic corpse flower), convulsion root/weed, death plant, eyebright, fitroot, and—cherry on top—fairy smoke. The plant’s Latin binomial is literal but beautiful, meaning roughly a “single-turning” (monos + tropos) “one-flower” (unus + flos); although the OED reaches back even further, as Arnold Zwicky notes, deriving Monotropa from an ancient Greek word that means “living alone, solitary.” These descriptions are all apt. The ghost pipe’s head-bowing blooms—compared by another nineteenth-century poet to nuns—grow throughout the summer, in dark, moist patches of the forest, near the trunks of the trees that feed and shade them. By autumn, however, the plant has turned from ghost to zombie, as its nodding head lifts to release its seeds, and the now-erect stalk dries into blacks and browns.

Ghost pipes are considered native across many regions of North America, as well as high-altitude regions of Central and South America, and throughout Eastern Asia. They are part of the monotropes subfamily (Monotropoideae), comprising approximately 15 to 20 species within the heath or heather family (Ericaceae), which also includes cranberries, blueberries, and the various rhododendrons. The ghostly monotropes are notable as non-photosynthesizing plants, surviving mysteriously without chlorophyll (hence their lack of green) and in extremely simplified form, often as single inflorescences rather than complex shrubs or trees. How does this phantom survive in the dark? As Merlin Sheldrake explains below, it took botanists more than a hundred years of speculation and debate until the facts became clear; over a series a discoveries that drastically changed our understanding of plants, fungi, and life on earth generally, they described the process of myco-heterotrophy that allows the monotropes to extract sustenance indirectly, not through a tree itself but from the fungi that symbiotically surrounds its roots.

Mirroring its natural environment, this species has survived in a special niche of modern poetry. Dickinson wrote her riddle-like poem about the ghost pipe, or Indian pipe (included below), around 1879; her correspondent and posthumous editor, Mabel Loomis Todd, titled it “The Spirit” when she published it in 1896. The plant appeared in other nineteenth century poems by Catharine Esther Beecher (sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) and Mary Potter Thacher Higginson; and later in haunting works by Sylvia Plath, G.C. Waldrep, and Christine Butterworth-McDermott. Together, these works offer a quiet, fragile, surprising recurrence—flowering once but surviving underground in roots that survive the winter.

Fig. 2. [Untitled painting gifted to Emily Dickinson] (c. 1882). Mabel Loomis Todd. Emily Dickinson Museum.

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Readings#

1. 'Tis whiter than an Indian pipe,
   'Tis dimmer than a lace;
   No stature has it, like a fog,
   When you approach the place.
   
   Not any voice denotes it here,
   Or intimates it there;
   A spirit, how doth it accost?
   What customs hath the air?
   
   This limitless hyperbole
   Each one of us shall be;
   'Tis drama, if (hypothesis)
   It be not tragedy!

Emily Dickinson. “XVIII. The Spirit.” [‘Tis whiter than an Indian pipe,”]. Poems: Third Series. Ed. Mabel Loomis Todd. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1896. 156.#

2. Monotropa have long puzzled biologists. In the late nineteenth century, a Russian botanist, wrestling with the question of how these strange plants were able to exist, was the first to suggest that substances could pass between plants via fungal connections. The idea didn’t catch on. It was a passing conjecture buried in an obscure article and it sank more or less without a trace. The Monotropa riddle moldered away for another seventy-five years before it was picked up by the Swedish botanist Erik Björkman, who in 1960 injected trees with radioactive sugars and was able to show that radioactivity accumulated in nearby Monotropa plants. It was the first demonstration that substances might pass between plants via a fungal pathway.

   Monotropa lured botanists into uncovering an entirely new biological possibility. Since the 1980s, it has become clear that Monotropa isn’t an anomaly. Most plants are promiscuous and can engage with many mycorrhizal partners. Mycorrhizal fungi, too, are promiscuous in their relationships with plants. Separate fungal networks can fuse with each other. The result? Potentially vast, complex, and collaborative systems of shared mycorrhizal networks.

Merlin Sheldrake. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our World, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Future. New York: Random House, 2020. 150.#

Supplementum#

• Nina Foster. “Ghost of the Forest: Monotropa uniflora.” JSTOR Daily (October 25, 2024).

• John Hessler. Finding Emily’s Flowers: Searching for the Ghost Plants of Emily Dickinson.” Johns Hopkins University (May 21, 2024).

• Maria Popova. “The Poetic Science of the Ghost Pipe: Emily Dickinson and the Secret of Earth’s Most Supernatural Flower.” The Marginalian (August 23, 2023).

• Martin Bidartondo. “The Evolutionary Ecology of Myco-heterotrophy.” New Phytologist 167 (2005): 335–352.

• Gordon Mitchell. “Indian Pipe.” On the Fringe: Journal of The Native Plant Society of Northeastern Ohio(December 2010).

Fig. 3. “Monotropa uniflora. Indian pipe.” John Torrey. A Flora of the State of New-York. Volume 1. Albany, New York: Carroll and Cook, 1843.

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✦ From The Earthly Book of Hours ✦#

It’s only 57 days until the winter solstice! Prepare yourself by ordering a set of five postcards, complete with citations and links to the Earthly Hours archive. The print edition will ship in a few weeks. The digital edition is available now, if you want to try printing them yourself.

Fig. 4. "2026 Winter Solstice: Postcard 3 (Front and Back)."