A strange thing, the mushroom, of short annual appearances (though the roots, or mycelium, are perennial), of quick growth and quick decay. Some of them are already turned into rotten dark brown, nearly liquid heaps. Others will gradually dry up and disappear, but now, on this tag end of a moist season, they are the local bounty. They have curled edges like cabbage or dead oak leaves. They take the form of single stems and fronds like seaweed. They are fringed, scalloped, round or flat, thin or fat. They bunch together at the base of an old stump, or they climb the side of a tree in shelves. Their heads take the form of lima beans, or floppy rabbit ears, fans, umbrellas, trumpets, shaggy hats, or cottage roofs. They are scaly, rough, smooth, or silky. They have thin stems and dainty heads like flowers; or both head and stem look like one great overgrown protuberance. Here and there, coming through the leaf litter, are yellow bunches of coral mushrooms, so called because they have the look of branched coral; and in the deep shade they seem almost luminous. In fact, whether or not any mushrooms do have a luminosity, like some fungi, they have a glimmer of decay about them in our imagination. They are of the earth unearthly, in spite of the fact that many of them provide substantial beds for insect larvae, that they are good, if sometimes treacherous food, and that they can raise the top off a road. This year has also been rich in Indian pipes. This is that unreal, pure-white plant, which, in more mythical times, has been called the corpse plant, or ghost flower. It blooms by itself, though out of the moist woodland humus like the mushrooms, lacking chlorophyll as they do. There is some dispute apparently, consistent with the Indian pipe’s ghostly nature, about what it really is. Some books refer to it as a “saprophyte,” which means a plant that absorbs its nutrition from dead or decaying organic matter, but in others it is called a “parasite.” A parasite gets its nourishment from a living host. The Indian pipe has a very small mat of rootlets where the thick stems join together at the base of the plant. If you dig it out of the ground it looks as if it were resting on bare knuckles. These roots, according to the botanists, have an outer layer of funguslike tissue, which means that the fungus rather than the roots has actual contact with the soil. So it sounds as though the Indian pipe, being dependent for its food on the fungus and not the soil or humus, were a parasite. Another alternative, if the fungus gets any nourishment from the plant, is that they live in a state of mutual association, or symbiosis. Thus science, still trying for exactitude, and the Indian pipe, still unaccountable. It seems to be on the verge of several worlds rather than an integral part of one, a plant you might meet in a dream.