HELL ROOT.


   It's that time of year again, every plant has it's moment to rise
up from the earth, flower, set seed and die back. l was driving up
the dry river bed the other day and there pushing through the hard
dry earth were the most spectacular, spears of bright yellow
flowers. They had no leaves, just a multi flowered aspargus tip,that
pierced through the ground, growing to a good foot tall and more.
They were single stalks  but were growing in small groups of two or
three. We do get them here quite regularly and this is there time.
   Each flower head could be an armfull. The florets resemble snap-
dragons. The spears are also hairy and eventually exude a stickyness
that is very atractive to ants.
   The plant belongs to a group called orobanche (to strangle).
They are a holoparasitic plant, sustaining themselves totally by
sucking the nutients from the roots of a host plant. Vampire root
would be a more discriptive name.
    While the hemaphrodite flowers are beautifull to behold above
ground, it's what goes on underground that is more sinister.
After the flowers have dropped their seeds, they can lie dormant
for several years untill their time comes again. The seeds can pick
up chemical messages from a host plant. These stimulate the seeds
to send out their vampire root (haustoria root) The very end, the hyphal
tip, is extreamly fine, it searches out the root of the host plant, sometimes
travelling a metre or more. When found it penetrates  the tissues of the roots
of the host plant forming a tuber, which in some parts of the world are eaten.
The Hell Root.