A Plant for Halloween

Halloween deserves a creepy plant, and I have just the one.

This plant is called beechdrops. I’m not the only person to think that it looks creepy. As the writer at one wildflower website put it, “From a distance, this plant looks like it is dead, even when it is in bloom, resembling an elongated skeletal hand that has poked up from the ground.” I’m not sure I’d go quite that far, but the plant does look eerie both in the skeletal whiteness of its youth and the gangly brownness of its old age.

But beechdrops doesn’t just look creepy, it is creepy. It’s a parasite. Like a ghostly leech, it survives by sucking energy from its host plant, the American beech. This parasitic relationship is referenced in the flower’s scientific name, Epifagus virginiana (“epifagus” means “upon beech”). The beechdrops plant taps into the tree’s roots using a structure called a haustorium. This doesn’t hurt the host beech, though. According to Wikipedia, beechdrops is actually an indicator of forest health (“the lack of its presence is a sign that forest health is declining”). I would say that forest health is declining here, but not enough to have scared the creepy plant away, and I’ll take that as a win.

What else is interesting to know about beechdrops? Like Indian pipe and pinesap (a.k.a. false beechdrops) this plant has no chlorophyll, which explains its coloring. Like several of the other plants I’ve investigated, including violets, jewelweed, and Venus’s looking glass, beechdrops has both regular and cleistogamous (self-pollinating) flowers. It’s pollinated by winter ants, and its seeds are dispersed by rain.

Beechdrops is a plant that’s easy to overlook, because it tends to blend in with the background. Let it be a reminder to us to stop every now and again along our way and take a closer look at the things around us. We might be surprised at what we find. Today is Halloween, and who knows what other creepy things we might see if we really look…