CALIFORNIA
PIPEVINE
late
Jan-March
Here is a flower you have to study to realize it is a flower. The greeny-purple, inflated, peanut-sized structure is a flower designed to trap fungus gnats (teeny, tiny flies) bringing in pollen from other pipevines and then send them out with pollen from this flower. Someone thought the flowers of this and other vines in this family look like the pipe Sherlock Holmes smoked, so they called them pipevines.
The flower's procedure, as worked out for a South American pipevine, is something like this: The first day the flower opens it releases an odor attractive to fungus gnats, and they come in to the spacious, light chamber inside the flower. Something like little, downward pointing hairs in the throat of the flower prevent the flies from climbing back out. If the flies brought in pollen from a previous flower, they dust it onto the pistil while they bounce around in the chamber. On the second day the flower stops releasing the attractive odor, and the pistils bend over so they can't receive more pollen. The next day the anthers of the stamens burst inside the flower, dusting the flies with pollen, and the hairs in the throat of the flower shrivel, so the flies can exit, taking the pollen with them, hopefully to another pipevine's flower.
This vine in the Arb will probably never make a fruit. Like many plants it must be cross-pollinated, that is, pollinated with pollen from a different individual, to develop a fruit. Notice it has a mechanism to prevent self-pollination. There are two pipevine individuals in the Arb, but both are cuttings off the same original, so in a way they are the same individual and can't pollinate each other.
The California pipevine is the only host plant of the pipevine swallowtail, a large, black butterfly. (Host plant = the species an insect can live on. Most herbivorous insects can live on only some of the plants available.)
Both the pipevine and the pipevine butterfly have been brought to Fieldbrook and now Arcata from further inland, by native plant enthusiasts tampering with nature.
Plants in this family are also called birthworts. They provided some medicine that aided in childbirth.