A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1323 entries
epiphyte
An epiphyte is a plant that grows on another plant without taking anything from it. It uses the host as a place to stand and gets its water and nutrients from rain, mist, and whatever debris collects around its roots. Orchids, bromeliads, ferns, mosses, and lichens all do it. In a wet tropical forest the epiphytes can outweigh the leaves of the trees carrying them.
Etymology
The word is built from the Greek for upon and the Greek for plant, and it belongs to the same family of habitat terms as chasmophyte for a plant of rock crevices and lithophyte for one on bare stone. An epiphyte is a tenant and not a thief. A plant that takes from its host is a parasite, and mistletoe is the familiar one that looks like an epiphyte and is not.
Notes
Epiphyte mats build their own soil in the canopy out of dust, dead leaves, and their own decay, and some canopy trees put out roots into it from above, feeding on the compost growing on their own branches. That canopy soil holds a whole community of invertebrates, amphibians, and small mammals that may never touch the ground.