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Species Image Gallery (opens in a new window) |
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| THE INDIAN-PIPE FAMILY | |||||||||
| The Indian-pipe family is easy to recognize because these plants do not have chlorophyll, meaning that they are not green. To obtain nutrients, these plants live off of decaying matter in the soil. The stems are fleshy and can be pink, yellow, reddish or whitish. The leaves are reduced to small, scale-like structures. The flowers can be solitary or in branched or unbranched clusters. The flowers are generally the same colour as the plant and have four or five sepals and petals, up to 12 stamens and one style and stigma. The fruit is a capsule or occasionally, a berry. | |||||||||
| WOODLAND PINE-DROPS | |||||||||
| LATIN NAME: Pterospora andromedea | |||||||||
| WHAT DOES IT LOOK LIKE? | |||||||||
| Woodland pine-drops can grow as tall as 90 cm from a rounded mass of roots. The white to purplish or reddish-brown stems are bulb-like at the base and have sticky, glandular hairs. The leaves are scale-like and are crowded near the base of the stem. The flowers are nodding in a many-flowered unbranched cluster up to 30 cm long. The sepals are covered in glands and the petals are white. Each flower has 10 stamens with awned anthers. The fruit is a capsule. | |||||||||
| WHERE DOES IT GROW? | |||||||||
| Woodland pine-drops grow in lodgepole pine woods. | |||||||||
| WHERE IS IT FOUND IN SASKATCHEWAN? | |||||||||
| This species is found in southwestern Saskatchewan in the Cypress Upland ecoregion. | |||||||||
| WHY IS IT RARE? | |||||||||
| Woodland pine-drop is threatened because of rarity in Saskatchewan. It is highly restricted in the province and most local populations are small. No immediate threats are known but are quite possible in the future. | |||||||||
| HOW TO IDENTIFY WOODLAND PINE-DROPS | |||||||||
| * Is the plant saprophytic (i.e. not green, living
on decaying organic matter) and sticky? * Are the flowers nodding in unbranched clusters? * Are the leaves scale-like? * Did you find it in the Cypress Hills in southwestern Saskatchewan? | |||||||||
If you answered yes to all of these questions, you may have found woodland pine-drops! |
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