Groundcone

Spotted: these favorite weird little plants today in our yard.

Catching a glimpse of them felt like good fortune … like a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow I didn’t even know was there.

When I spotted these cone-shaped yellow torches, I was forcing myself to 1) walk / get my minimum paltry expected number of steps demanded by my Fitbit, and 2) do so outside with my vision-strengthening exercise I try to do where I try to focus on something in the distance (to balance out all of the time spent focusing on things close to me, namely my phone and other handheld devices with screens).

My practice is to walk a straight line back and forth between a fir tree at the back of our yard and this fir tree at the front corner of our house, maintaining my gaze on the tree as I head towards it.

When I reach the tree, part of my ritual is to stretch my arms up and plant my palms on the trunk of the tree, feeling the bark and feeling grateful for the tree and letting it know I’m here and I love and admire it, experience how big and strong it is while stretching my armpits and shoulders and calves and stuff.

It was in the process of this hand-plant and stretch that I got my face close enough to the tree and into the salal bushes around its base that I spotted the yellow within the shade of the brush:

I’m not totally sure what the name of these plants are even though I’ve looked them up before. Vancouver groundcone? Hooker’s groundcone? Apparently it’s a parasitic plant that gets its nutrition from plants and trees, like the salal (we have a lot of it) and this fir tree. I believe we’ve seen them here at this property where we live before and out and about in local parks forested with evergreens, but not often. We see Indian Pipe more regularly.

Digging around on the internet, I see wnps.org describes Vancouver groundcone as quite elusive, so I guess we’ve been pretty lucky.

In fact, the same post goes on to quote Pojar and Mackinnon in Plants of the Pacific Northest Coast with this nugget

“… this plant was also used as a good luck charm by some of the central coastal groups of B.C.”

I did (and still do) feel like spotting this today was fortuitous and lucky. A special  blessing rewarding me for my little effortful exercise(s), reminding me how much good stuff there is out there to see and feel and witness and be a part of. A reminder of how special where we live is.