“Broomrape” – What a strange and off-putting name for this small group of flowers on the edge of our gravel driveway. I have never seen these before or anywhere else.  They are small flowers.  The stems are about 4" long. 

I was hoping it would turn out to be a rare and sought-after plant, only to find with a bit of research that it is considered a “weed pest” and a “parasite plant”!

It has no chlorophyll-producing leaves. It seems this means that it is getting its energy from a host plant. This is apparently done through the root system, with the broomrape’s modified roots penetrating the host plant. (FWIW, the host plant was not obvious or discernible, but these were growing at the edge of our bed of day lilies that abuts our gravel driveway.)

Like many of the flowers I have been posting I used in-camera focus stacking and photoshop to combine (into one) a series of identically composed images focused at different points (front to back) on the flowers. In this case I used 20 images to get everything sharp from front to back. Photoshop combined them all in one .tiff image which I then further processed in Lightroom Classic.

"Broomrape"
May 28, 2020
Panasonic GX80/85
Olympus 60mm F2.8 Macro (120mm equivalent)
F4 - 1/400sec - ISO200
20 focus bracketed images stacked in Photoshop
and further processed in Lightroom Classic