The Nuytsia floribunda , which can reach 30 feet high, preys upon grass and even the domestic carrot. A holiday merrymaker loitering under the mistletoe may not be thinking much about parasitic plants. That's a loss, because the world's mistletologists are making wondrous findings about the more than 1,300 species they study. Some of the plants have flowers with trick openings. Some shoot their seeds farther than most watermelon spitters can spout.
Some mistletoes grow as parasites on other parasitic mistletoes.
And some give North Americans and Australians yet another way to misunderstand each other. He ranks certain mistletoes among the world's most beautiful plants. True, he's devoted decades to working out their classification and might be suspected of a certain bias. And then, there's the Christmas mistletoe. Viscum album , the holiday mainstay in England, puts out flowers no bigger than a pea and sprouts white berries.