Species page
Indian Pipe
Monotropa uniflora
Monotropaceae
White
Yellow
Occasionally in rich woods of deep East Texas and northeastern Texas one will find this odd plant. The Indian pipe is not a fungus! It is a flowering plant, a wildflower, that isn’t green because it has no chlorophyll. Rather than producing its own food through photosynthesis (which requires green chlorophyll, water, sun, and air), it “steals” its nutrition from nearby trees through a complex connection by way of fungi in the soil. So, although Indian pipes are not fungi, they depend on them!
