A Book of the Seasons: Pine-sap and Indian-pipe

I would make a chart of our life,

know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.

Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852

There is not only the tobacco-pipe,

but pine-sap. 

July 29, 1853

July 30, 2023

July 8.  Edith Emerson says she has seen the pine-sap this year in Concord.  July 8, 1857

July 22.  Monotropa uniflora, Indian-pipe.  July 22, 1852

July 23. The tobacco-pipe in damp woods. July 23, 1851

July 24.  Tobacco-pipe much blackened, out a long time. July 24, 1856

July 29.  Hypopitys lanuginosa, American pine-sap, just pushing up, — false beech-drops. Gray says from June to August. It is cream-colored or yellowish under the pines in Hubbard's Wood Path. Some near the fence east of the Close. A plant related to the tobacco-pipe. Remarkable this doubleness in nature, — not only that nature should be composed of just these individuals, but that there should be so rarely or never an individual without its kindred, — its cousin. It is allied to something else. There is not only the tobacco-pipe, but pine-sap. July 29, 1853

 July 30. The tobacco-pipe has also pushed up there amid the dry leaves in the shade. It is abundant now, and here. Both stem and flowers and scales are a pure and delicate crystalline white  What to name it? Sheathed with delicate white scales. It reminded me of a maiden in her robes of purity who has always been nurtured in a shady and vaul-like seclusion, a nun of spotless purity, a daughter of Tellus and Cælum too, making her entrance into the world. Pushing aside the doorway of dry leaves, three sisters of various heights issue from their hidden convent and stand side by side in the presence of the light. We are surprised to see such pure robes come from the bowels of the earth. Yet this white and crystal-line purity smacks of the cellar and shade. They come forth to be proved, and stand abashed in presence of the light, with hanging heads and faces toward the ground under their pure white hoods and capes, striving at first to conceal their nakedness and tenderness. A few loose, scanty, but beautiful, pearly sheaths alone invested them, and the broader capes of their hoods. The sisters then came forth of spotless purity,, but soon, exposed to light and air  their virtue dried black. I was surprised to hear that this was called the tobacco-pipe! Their untried virtue cannot long stand the light and air. These and pine-sap the plants the dog-days (?) produce.  July 30, 1853

July 30.  I have seen a few new fungi within a week. The tobacco-pipes are still pushing up white amid the dry leaves, sometimes lifting a canopy of leaves with them four or five inches. July 30, 1854

July 31.  To Flint’s Pond . . . I have smelled fungi in the thick woods for a week, though they are not very common. I see tobacco-pipes now in the path.  July 31, 1858

August 10. I see many tobacco-pipes, now perhaps in their prime, if not a little late, and hear of pine-sap. The Indian pipe, though coming with the fungi and suggesting, no doubt, a close relation to them, — a sort of connecting link between flowers and fungi, — is a very interesting flower, and will bear a close inspection when fresh. The whole plant has a sweetish, earthy odor, though Gray says it is inodorous. I see them now on the leafy floor of this oak wood, in families of twelve to thirty sisters of various heights,—from two to eight inches,— as close together as they can stand, the youngest standing close up to the others, all with faces yet modestly turned downwards under their long hoods. Here is a family of about twenty-five within a diameter of little more than two inches, lifting the dry leaves for half their height in a cylinder about them. They generally appear bursting up through the dry leaves, which, elevated around, may serve to prop them. Springing up in the shade with so little color, they look the more fragile and delicate. They have very delicate pinkish half-naked stems with a few semitransparent crystalline-white scales for leaves, and from the sinuses at the base of the petals without (when their heads are drooping) more or less dark purple is reflected, like the purple of the arteries seen on a nude body. They appear not to flower only when upright. Gray says they are upright in fruit. They soon become black-specked, even before flowering.  August 10, 1858

August 13.  Hypopytis abundantly out (how long ?), apparently a good while, in that long wood-path on the left side, under the oak wood, before you begin to rise, going from the river end. Very little indeed is yet erect, and that which is not is apparently as forward as the rest. Not generally quite so high as the Monotropa uniflora which grows with it. I see still in their midst the dry upright brown spikes of last year’s seed-vessels. August 13, 1858

August 14.  Hypopitys, just beyond the last large (two-stemmed) chestnut at Saw Mill Brook, about done. Apparently a fungus like plant. It erects itself in seed. August 14, 1856.

August 23.  See an abundance of pine-sap on the right of Pine-sap Path. It is almost all erect, some eight to nine inches high, and all effete there. Some stems are reddish. It lifts the leaves with it like the Indian-pipe, but is not so delicate as that. The Indian-pipe is still pushing up. August 23, 1858

August 27.  Tobacco-pipe still.  August 27, 1856

August 31. Tobacco-pipe (Monotropa uniflora) in Spring Swamp Path.  August 31, 1851

August 31. The monotropa is still pushing up. August 31, 1858 

September 1. P. M. — To Saw Mill Brook and Flint's Pond . . . See, I think, my first tobacco-pipe this afternoon, now that they are about done, and have seen no pine-sap this year, abundant as both the above were last year. Like fungi, these plants are apparently scarce in a dry year, so that you might at first think them rare plants. This is a phenomenon of drought. September 1, 1859

September 9. C. brings me a small red hypopitys. It has a faint sweet, earthy, perhaps checkerberry, scent, like that sweet mildewy fragrance of the earth in spring. September 9, 1857

September 21. Came through that thick white pine wood on the east of the spruce swamp. This is a very dense white pine grove . . . Under this dense shade, the red-carpeted ground is almost bare of vegetation and is dark at noon. There grow . . .on the low west side and also the east side, an abundance of tobacco-pipe, which has begun to turn black at the tip of the petals and leaves.  September 21, 1857

September 23. I see yellow pine-sap, in the woods just east of where the beeches used to stand, just done, but the red variety is very common and quite fresh generally there. September 23, 1857

September 23. Red pine-sap by north side of Yew Path some ten rods east of yew, not long done. The root of the freshest has a decided checkerberry scent, and for a long time — a week after — in my chamber, the bruised plant has a very pleasant earthy sweetness. September 23, 1860

October 6.  Going through Ebby Hubbard's woods . . . I see a great quantity of hypopitys, now all sere, along the path in the woods beyond. Call it Pine-Sap Path. It seems to have been a favorable season for it. It was evidently withered earlier than the tobacco-pipe, which is still pretty white! October 6, 1857

October 14. On the top of Ball’s Hill, nearly half-way its length, the red pine-sap, quite fresh, apparently not long in bloom, the flower recurved. As last year, I suspect that this variety is later than the yellowish one, of which I have seen none for a long time. The last, in E. Hubbard’s wood, is all brown and withered. This is a clear and distinct deep-red from the ground upward, all but the edges and tips of the petals, and is very handsome amid the withered lower leaves, as it were the latest flower of the year. The roots have not only a sweet earthy, but decidedly checkerberry, scent. At length this fungus-like plant bursts red-ripe, stem and all, from the ground. Its deep redness reminds me of the deeper colors of the western sky after the sun has set, — a sort of afterglow in the flowery year. I suspect that it is eminently an autumnal flower.  October 14, 1858

November 25. Methinks there has been more pine-sap than usual the past summer. I never saw a quarter part so much. It stands there withered in dense brown masses, six or eight inches high, partly covered with dead leaves. The tobacco-pipes are a darker brown. November 25, 1857

July 30, 2023

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau, Pine-sap and Indian-pipe

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau

 "A book, each page written in its own season,

out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2025

Notes.  

We’ve been seeing numerous clusters of both ghost plant (Monotropa uniflora) and yellow pine-sap (Hypopitys monotropa). These plants, which are often mistaken for fungi, lack chlorophyll and don’t rely on photosynthesis. Instead, both are mycotrophs, meaning that they parasitize mycorrhizal fungi, and in this way, indirectly, pull energy from the roots of the trees. Although they’re similar looking, if you inspect their flowers closely, you’ll see that ghost plant has singular flowers, whereas pine-sap produces cascades of flowers. Pine-sap also has fuzz on its stems, and ghost plant does not. (Most of the time ghost plant is also much more pure white than pine-sap…but that isn’t a reliable distinction.) ~northernwoodlandsmagazine #ThisWeekintheWoods July 27. 2023

The red, yellow (and other “species” of pine sap) are often lumped together as Monotropa hypopitys, described generally as a saprophytic, red, pink, lavender, or yellow plant with several vase-like, nodding flowers on a downy, scaly stem; stem and flowers colored alike, with  autumn-flowering plants being red color, and early-flowering plants yellow.  Like Indian-pipe, pine-saps are mycotrophs, receiving nutrients via fungal mycelia rather than through photosynthesis. ~ GoBotany, Wildflower.org

"Pine drops" (Pterospora andromedea).See First Sighting Of 'Pine-Drops' Plant In Massachusetts In Berkshires; MassWildlife; U.S. Forest Service.

I sometimes remember something which I have told another as worth telling to myself.

August 23. 

Cooler than ever. Some must have fires, and I close my window. 

P. M. —Britton’s camp via Hubbard’s Close. 

The rhexia in the field west of Clintonia Swamp makes a great show now, though a little past prime. 

I go through the swamp, wading through the luxuriant cinnamon fern, which has complete possession of the swamp floor. Its great fronds, curving this way and that, remind me [of] a tropical vegetation. They are as high as my head and about a foot wide; may stand higher than my head without being stretched out. They grow in tufts of a dozen, so close that their fronds interlace and form one green waving mass. There in the swamp cellar under the maples. A forest of maples rises from a forest of ferns. My clothes are covered with the pale-brown wool which I have rubbed off their stems.

See an abundance of pine-sap on the right of Pine-sap Path. It is almost all erect, some eight to nine inches high, and all effete there. Some stems are reddish. It lifts the leaves with it like the Indian-pipe, but is not so delicate as that. The Indian-pipe is still pushing up.

Everywhere in woods and swamps I am already reminded of the fall. 

I see the spotted sarsaparilla leaves and brakes, and, in swamps, the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and hellebore, and, by the river, the already blackening pontederias and pipes. 

There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter.

I see a golden-crowned thrush, but it is silent except a chip; sitting low on a twig near the main stem of a tree, in these deep woods.

High blackberries now in their prime, their great racemes of shining black fruit, mixed with red and green, bent over amid the sweet-fern and sumach on sunny hill sides, or growing more rankly with larger fruit by rich roadsides and in lower ground. 

The chewink note of a chewink (not common), also a cuckoo’s note.

Smooth sumach berries all turned crimson. This fruit is now erect spear-heads, rising from the ample dark-green, unspotted leaves, pointing in various directions. 

I see dense patches of the pearly everlasting, maintaining their ground in the midst of dense green sweet-fern, a striking contrast of snow-white and green. 

Viburnum nudum berries, apparently but a day or two. 

Epilobium angustifolium is abundantly shedding its downy seed, — wands of white and pink. 

Emerson says that he and Agassiz and Company broke some dozens of ale-bottles, one after another, with their bullets, in the Adirondack country, using them for marks! It sounds rather Cockneyish. He says that he shot a peetweet for Agassiz, and this, I think he said, was the first game he ever bagged. He carried a double-barrelled gun, —rifle and shotgun, — which he bought for the purpose, which he says received much commendation, — all parties thought it a very pretty piece. 

Think of Emerson shooting a peetweet (with shot) for Agassiz, and cracking an ale-bottle (after emptying it) with his rifle at six rods! They cut several pounds of lead out of the tree. It is just what Mike Saunders, the merchant’s clerk, did when he was there.  

The writer needs the suggestion and correction that a correspondent or companion is. I sometimes remember something which I have told another as worth telling to myself, i.e. writing in my Journal. 

Channing, thinking of walks and life in the country, says, “You don’t want to discover anything new, but to discover something old,” i.e. be reminded that such things still are.

H. D. Thoreau, Journal, August 23, 1858

There is no plateau on which Nature rests at midsummer, but she instantly commences the descent to winter. See August 5, 1854 ("It is one long acclivity from winter to midsummer and another long declivity from midsummer to winter."); August 19, 1851("Nature rests no longer at her culminating point than at any other. If you are not out at the right instant, the summer may go by and you not see it.”); August 23. 1853 ("Observing the blackness of the foliage, especially between me and the light, I am reminded that it begins in the spring, the dewy dawn of the year, with a silvery hoary downiness, changing to a yellowish or light green, — the saffron-robed morn, — then to a pure, spotless, glossy green with light under sides reflecting the light, — the forenoon, — and now the dark green, or early afternoon, when shadows begin to increase, and next it will turn yellow or red, — the sunset sky, — and finally sere brown and black, when the night of the year sets in.")

High blackberries now in their prime. See August 23, 1856 ("Now for high blackberries"); and note to August 31, 1857 ("An abundance of fine high blackberries behind Britton's old camp on the Lincoln road, now in their prime there, which have been overlooked. Is it not our richest fruit?")

I see dense patches of the pearly everlasting, maintaining their ground in the midst of dense green sweet-fern, a striking contrast of snow-white and green. See August 23, 1856 ("I see a bed of Antennaria margaritacea, now in its prime, by the railroad, and very handsome. . . . dense pearly masses of flowers covered with bees and butterflies")