INDIAN PIPES 



By Mrs. Mary Earle Hardy. 



"VTL 7"ISE ones assume to know how certain flowers come 

 by their complexions, their perfume, their habits, 

 and their habitats, but there are myriads whose life stories 

 wonderment only guesses and no man knows. I recently 

 came upon a group of such flowers, the Indian pipes (Mono- 

 tropa). They seemed the very prototypes of silence and 

 stood like little decorated interrogation points on a page 

 of one of Nature's story books. Science tells us many 

 strange facts about these Monotropas, but these do not 

 touch on the heart of the matter, nor let us into the secret 

 of their being. They give us no hint of why these plants 

 have taken such quaint and graceful shapes and have 

 chosen to bring such whiteness into our sun-loving world 

 of color. 



These snow-white blossoms or "ghost flowers" seem 

 weird escapes from spirit gardens. They haunt only 

 darkly shadowed forests and stand with bowed heads in 

 deepest solitudes. Though solitary flowered, they usually 

 grow in groups and are half hidden among the leaves and 

 tufted mosses of deep and loamy woodlands. They attract, 

 they repel, they fascinate, they awe. 



The whole plant which is from three to ten inches in 

 height is white as the whitest snow except that sometimes 

 the youngest blossoms have the faintest touch of baby pink. 

 The waxen clamminess of the entire plant brings shivers 



