In the late autumn of 1890, four years after Emily Dickinson’s death, her poems met the world for the first time in a handsome volume bound in white. Beneath the gilded title was a flower painting by Mabel Loomis Todd — the complicated woman chiefly responsible for editing and publishing Dickinson’s poems and letters.
Any flower would have been a fitting emblem for the poet who spent her life believing that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” but none more than this one — a flower she had collected in the woods of Amherst as “a wondering Child,” then pressed into her teenage herbarium and into her poems, enchanted by its “almost supernatural” appearance.
She considered it “the preferred flower of life.”
Monotropa uniflora, known as ghost pipe, is unlike the vast majority of plants on Earth. White as bone, it lacks the chlorophyll by which other plants capture photons and turn light into sugar for life.
Throughout the summer — usually after rainfall, usually under beech trees — the ghost pipe emerges from the darkest regions of the forest floor in clusters, from the Himalayas to Costa Rica to Amherst. Each stem bears a single nodding flower — a tiny chandelier of several translucent petals encircling its dozen stamens and single pistil. Bumblebees, drawn to the pale beauty despite their astonishing ultraviolet vision, are the ghost pipe’s most passionate pollinators.
The secret of Earth’s most “supernatural” flower is its uncommon relationship with the rest of nature:
Rather than reaching up for sunlight like green plants, the ghost pipe reaches down, into the mycorrhizal network that undergirds the forest. Its cystidia — the fine hairs coating its roots — entwine around the branching filaments of underground fungi, known as hyphae. So connected, the ghost pipe begins to sap nutrients the fungus has drawn from the roots of nearby photosynthetic trees.
Out of this second-hand survival, such breathtaking beauty.
By late autumn, the ghost pipe has turned black and brittle. By winter, it has vanished.
“That it will never come again,” Dickinson wrote, “is what makes life so sweet.”
From the brevity and beauty of the ghost pipe’s bloom emerges a tender living poem about the transience of life, about its mystery, about the delicate interdependence that deepens its sweetness.
Complement with a Dickinson-inspired adventure in nature’s nonbinary botany and some Dickinson-lensed reflections on the flower and the meaning of life, then relish the ongoing mystery of chlorophyll.
Maria Popova
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