The next hike will be on Saturday, 20th July.
We meet at the Ballpark in Gillies Bay at 10:00am.
Pinesap is one of these oddball plants that really catch the eye when their brightly coloured flowers have pushed up from the forest floor. The scientific name is Montropa hypopitys and it's one of those plants that has no chlorophyl so it has no way to make the food it needs with the help of sunlight. Instead it uses a particular fungus growing under the ground which in turn takes food from the roots of nearby trees, so you could say it's parasitic on a parasite! On Texada the most common colour of Pinesap is the reddish brown of the one in my photo, but elsewhere in its geographic range the colour can vary a lot, sometimes yellow and even white. We saw several clusters of flowers of this species on our hike last week which took us to a viewpoint overlooking the Malaspina Strait not far south of Black Mountain.
JD.
Pinesap flowers just starting to push up from the forest floor.
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