A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1133 entries
coralroot
Coralroot is an orchid with no green in it. It has no working leaves and almost no chlorophyll, and it lives off fungi in the forest floor, tapping into the network that connects to tree roots and taking sugar out of it. What shows above ground is a bare stem in pink, purple, or yellow-brown carrying a spike of small orchid flowers, and it appears for a few weeks and then is gone.
Etymology
The name comes from the underground part rather than the visible one. Instead of roots, the plant has a branched, knobby mass of rhizome that looks like a piece of coral, and that is what botanists dug up and named it for. The scientific name says the same thing in Greek, and the English is a direct translation of it.
Notes
Because coralroot depends on a fungus that depends on a tree, it only grows in established woodland and cannot be transplanted. Spotted coralroot is widespread in North American conifer forest, and striped coralroot turns up in the Southwest mountains. Plants of the same kind that live entirely on fungi are called mycoheterotrophs, and Indian pipe is the best-known one that is not an orchid.