Minnesota Plant Life. 



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grow together in a tuft, and the whole plant-body is commonly 

 of a snow-white color, with yellowish or reddish scales. At the 

 tip of each stem is a single, nodding flower, around which the 

 bracts are white. This variety is not uncommon throughout 

 the state and is to be looked for in deep woods where a rich 

 layer of decaying leaves has collected. 



Pine-saps. The pine-sap, more abundant in the pine woods 

 and extending south to Gull lake and Taylor's Falls, resembles 

 the Indian-pipe or corpse-plant in almost all particulars, but it 

 may at once be identified by its having several flowers clustered 

 at the tip of each stem, instead of the single flower of the more 

 common variety. 



The three plants last mentioned are quite fungus-like in their 

 habits of food-collection. Unlike most flowering plants, they 

 do not produce leaf-green. They may be described as plants 

 which have lost the power of making their own starch, and 

 have learned, through the cooperation of root-fungi, to take 

 their food in complex form from the decaying remains of other 

 vegetation. Structurally they are not very different from the 

 wintergreens, and so must be classed with them rather than 

 with the fungi, which physiologically they resemble. Winter- 

 greens are not the only kind of flowering plants that have 

 given rise to such types of fungus-like forms. Among the 

 orchids it will be remembered that the coralroots showed the 

 same tendency to take their food "ready-made" rather than to 

 manufacture it independently from carbonic-acid gas and water. 



Labrador teas. An abundant variety of Minnesota heath 

 growing in bogs, especially through the northern part of the 

 state, is the Labrador tea. It is an evergreen shrub with leaves 

 shaped very much like those of the willow, green upon the upper 

 side and covered with a soft, rust-brown wool below. The 

 margins of the leaves are somewhat curled over toward the 

 under side. The flowers, borne in umbels, are white, and each 

 matures a five-chambered, oblong dry capsule, that splits from 

 the base into five segments. The plant abounds especially in 

 spruce swamps and among tamaracks. It is scarcely ab- 

 sent from a single spruce swamp in the state. A form, known 

 as the narrow-leafed Labrador tea, with much slenderer leaves 

 than the common species, grows along the Pigeon river in 

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