The fat stems, long, fringed bracts, and blossoms are all a vivid blood red the botanical name could not be more appropriate, translating as fleshy blood. Snow plant is scattered through the middle elevations of the Sierra, as well as in the Klamaths, Cascades, and high mountains of southern California. It forms colonies throughout much of the range of snowplant. Although widely distributed, it is seldom common, but once again becomes more prominent in the northern Sierra and the Klamath Mountains. Near the Bay Area, it is occasionally encountered in the area around Mount Saint Helena.
Indian pipe has gracefully nodding flowers.
The better known of the two species, M. uniflora , is noted for its pure white stems and single waxy white flower. On the 6th, we cut trunks from about one inch to tree inches in diameter for stump treatment to follow-up. We worked in two of about seven sections that Ed has mapped at the site. He is confident that with about six years of constant but diminishing effort, the invasion will be halted. It is pretty scary to think that the Mayten has been behaving pretty well for most of the one hundred years it has been grown in East Bay gardens, but has exploded into such a pest.