A delicate parasite: Buchnera tomentosa
During a recent hike in the province of Zambales in western Luzon, I chanced upon some plants of Buchnera tomentosa , a member of the mostly parasitic family Orobanchaceae . Buchnera is a genus of small plants distributed from North, Central, and South America; Africa; Madagascar, India; India, Southeast Asia; and Australia. Only B. tomentosa is known from the Philippines.These plants have been found from sea level to about 1800 m above sea level. Like many plants from the family, Buchnera species are parasitic on grasses. Unlike many plants from the family, Buchnera are hemi-parasitic, which means that the plants are still capable of photosynthesis instead of relying solely to their hosts for all their nutritional needs, like the holo-parasites do. As such, buchneras do bear leaves, which in B. tomentosa is a rosette of elongate-ovate leaves with obscurely toothed margins. Each rosette is about 2 to 2.5 cm in diameter. They are that tiny. The inflorescences tower well above