Pinesap

Pinesap is a wildflower with no green at all. The whole plant, from the stem and its scale-like leaves to the nodding flowers, is pale yellow, coral pink or red, and it pushes up through the needle litter of shady conifer forests in small clusters.

Without chlorophyll, pinesap cannot make food from sunlight. Instead it taps into mycorrhizal fungi that are already linked to the roots of nearby green plants and draws its carbon through that underground network. Botanists once called plants like this saprophytes, thinking they lived on rotting matter, but that idea has been dropped. Pinesap belongs to the heath family, along with its relative the ghost plant, which lives the same way.

It flowers from early summer well into fall. Early-blooming plants tend to be yellow, while those that bloom late in the season are often red. Each stem carries several narrow, bell-shaped flowers that hang down while blooming and then turn upright as the seed capsules develop. The dry stalks can stand long after the seeds are gone.

Look for it in mature, moist, shaded forest with a deep layer of humus, at low to middle elevations. It is widespread across North America but seldom encountered, so a cluster is a good find.