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Thank you both.
I think that Squawroot must be the most unglamorous flowering plant in our eastern hardwood forests. It seems that most people who see it for the first time don’t even realize that it is a wildflower and mistake it for some sort of mutant toadstool. But it is a true angiosperm, but one lacking chlorophyll, there is no green color anywhere on it. It has only vestigial leaves which are the brown scales that stick out all over. In early spring there are flowers but they are the same yellowish-brown color as the seed pods shown here. Since the plant can’t produce nutrients from sunlight it parasitizes the roots of oak trees. I like to think of Squawroot as the unsung hero of the forest understory.