Thankfully I have friends who aren't as lazy as I am when it comes to looking things up!
Meet Monotropa uniflora, also known as "Indian Pipe," "Ghost Plant," and/or "Corpse Plant." Spooky, right? Really, I should have recognized it because I described Indian Pipes in one of my novels, and I usually retain that sort of information well. The corpse plant (now one of my favorite plants), is a parasitic plant that feeds on other plants, usually fungi mycorrhizal with trees. Thus, it contains no chlorophyll and can grow in the darkness. Usually completely white in appearance, it can have black flecks (like the ones I found), have a pink coloration, or even a deeper red coloration (which would look awesome, in my opinion). Apparently they're even part of the blueberry family. See? Awesome plant.
I've been majorly behind on my blogs. Partially just because I've been busy in general. The horse was injured for a little bit (nothing too major, but it did require some spoiling by way of daily massages from his two-legger), I've been working on a fairly hefty project, and then my laptop died. Yep, died. I spent half a week first trying to repair it, then trying to confirm what I thought the problem was. The hard drive has too many bad sectors to function, so essentially, it suffered hard drive failure. Luckily I've been going between my laptop and family desktop so much that everything essential was already backed up. But, still, it's been a journey.
It's finally feeling like fall here (it was, and then we had a few days of disgusting 80* heat and humidity), so I do plan on getting the camera out to the stable at some point. It also occurred to me that I've hardly taken any photos of Andromeda, this year's filly. So that needs to be remedied.
All in all, I'm hanging in there. I hope everyone has been well (better than me, at least), and to my blogger friends: I'm way behind on my reading. But I'll catch up this weekend, I think.
