Photo: (c) Matt Berger, some rights reserved (CC BY), CC BY 4.0 (via Wikimedia Commons)

Thurber's Pilostyles

Pilostyles thurberi

Also known as Desert Pilostyles, Pilostyles

At a glance

Family

Apodanthaceae

Type

Endophytic holoparasite (a leafless, rootless flowering plant that lives inside its host)

Parts used

None, this plant has no traditional culinary, medicinal, or craft use

Size

The plant itself is invisible, threading through the host's tissue; only its flowers show, each just 2 to 4 millimeters across

Bloom

Tiny reddish brown to maroon flowers erupt directly through the host shrub's bark, usually in the cooler months following seasonal rain

Habitat

Desert washes and arroyos of the Sonoran Desert, from Arizona and southeastern California down into Sonora and Baja California, always attached to a living host shrub

Acquisition

Forage

This plant in HerbSense

Key benefits

✦

Living study in parasitism

Rare desert curiosity

Ecological indicator species

Prized by field botanists

Traditional uses

✦

Pilostyles thurberi has no known history in traditional herbalism, cooking, or folk medicine, and that absence is part of what makes it remarkable. It spends nearly its entire life hidden as thread-like strands woven through the stem tissue of desert shrubs in the pea family, most often Psorothamnus and Dalea species, drawing all its water and nourishment from its host like a plant-eating plant. The only sign it exists at all is a scatter of pinhead-sized flower buds that push up through the host's bark, looking almost like a rash or a cluster of tiny barnacles. Desert botanists and naturalists have long prized the rare sighting of it in bloom as a small, thrilling puzzle of the Sonoran Desert rather than a plant to gather or use.

How to grow & use it

✦

🔒

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Choose it when

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Did you know?

Pilostyles thurberi ranks among the smallest flowering plants on Earth. Its whole body lives as near-microscopic strands inside the stem of its host shrub, so the plant is essentially invisible for most of the year, only announcing itself when its minute flower buds break through the host's bark like tiny freckles.

Safety

Pilostyles thurberi has no history of food or medicinal use and no safety data, so it should not be eaten or used as a remedy. It is also extremely rare and best left undisturbed in the wild.