Western Coralroots at Hoypus Hill

The same day we visited the Au Sable Institute for a second time this season (June 7th) we also visited Hoypus Hill for a second time, looking for the Western Coralroot (Corallorhiza mertensiana) there.  We had found it on our first visit, but it was not in bloom.  This time it was in bloom everywhere.

We found several color varieties, distinguished especially by the color of the stem, though the flowers also vary somewhat in color.  The ordinary variety has stems that vary from a very dark to a lighter reddish purple, but there is a lighter variety (forma pallida) that has stems that are almost white.

We also found one plant of a pale yellow-stemmed variety.  There is no name I know of for this form, but it was very distinctive, though it only had a couple of flowers still blooming.  Interestingly, these color forms grow among each other and apparently interbreed since there are many intermediate shades.

These plants are monotropic and achlorphyllous, that is, they are without chlorophyll and live off decaying material in the soil.  They are often found, therefore, on dark forest floors where little else grows, something I've tried to convey in my photos.

For us that meant that photography was very difficult.  The combination of low light and a slight breeze made it almost impossible to get any depth of field in our pictures and meant, too, that many of the pictures we took were out of focus.  As is often the case, my wife did better than I did under these trying circumstances.

Corallorhiza mertensiana at Hoypus Hill.

Corallorhiza mertensiana, the Western Coralroot, has the most delicate flowers of the Coralroots native to the Pacific Northwest.  They look like tiny purple (or green) birds in flight, and because they are so fine and tiny they are often overlooked.

We visited Deception Pass State Park on Whidbey Island June 4th and again on June 12th to see them.  We found both the yellow-stemmed and purple-stemmed varieties and found them in abundance in the locations where we looked for them.

They are interesting in that they are almost always found in very dry locations under rather heavy forest cover with almost no other surrounding vegetation.  They grow through the litter of dead branches and twigs on the forest floor and receive only a minimum of sunlight.

Because they are saprophytic they do not need the sunlight to produce their food through photosynthesis, but it is nevertheless always a bit surprising to find them where nothing else seems to grow.  In the shade their purple color almost glows.