Butler citizen. [volume] (Butler, Pa.) 1877-1922, 1897-03-11
HOW MISTLETOE GROWS.
Pecullaritics of the Bush of Ancient
Druid and Modern Christian.

Druid and Modern Christian.
The mistletoe is perhaps the plant
par excellence of Christmas tradition,
more SO. probably, than the holly, for
the latter has only decorative uses,
while the association of the former is
with holiday festiyfty and mirth. No
plant on earth has ever aroused so many
kinds of interest on all possible grounds
as the mystic mistletoe. Take il how
you will, that strange shrub is n won
der. From every point of view it teens
with curiosity. Its parasitic mode OF
growth. its paradoxical greenness
among the bare boughs OF winter, its
pale and ghostly berries, its sticky fruit,
filled with yiscid birdlime, have all
aroused profound and respectful atten-
ton from the very earliest ages. Then
its religious Importance in so many
countries and ages, its connection with
Christmas and midwinter Saturnalia-
its social revival to our own time as
the Yuletide symbol, and its modern re
lation TO the pleasing anachronism of
indiscriminate kissing, all invest it
alike with an additional Fictitious inn
portance. Yet, strange to say, the full
story of the mistletoe has never yet
been written at any adequate length.
The modern mistletoe, as we know ii
to-day, in its present highly evolved
and degenerate state as q confirmed
parasite, is no longer an enigma. 1t is
q woody shrub, with yellowish green
leaves, which specially affects the
branches of apple trees, pears and pop
lars. The people who get their ideas
vaguely and at second hand from books
have q general notion, indeed, that the
Inistletoe's favorite haunt is the British
oak; this is a complete mistake, as it
was the very rarity of the mistletoe on
oaks that gave one, when found there,
it's peculiar sanctity in the eyes of
primitive peoples. In the purely wild
condition mistletoe grows mostly ON
poplars alone; in civilized and Guilt
waited soils it extends its depredations,
wherever it gets q chance, to apple or
chards and pear trees.
And this is the manner of the genera
tion of mistletoes: The young seed
lings sprout on a branch of their in
voluntary host, where the seed has been
carried by birds in way which l shall
hereafter more fully describe, at its
proper point in the life history of the
species Instead of roofing them
selves, however, like mere grounding
plants, by small fibrous rootlets, they
fasten by a sort of sucl1er-lile process
to the tissues of the tree on which they
feed, and, penetrating it's bark to the
living layer just beneath, suck up elab-
GRATED sap from the veins of their vic
tim. Thus they live at the expense of
the poplar, whose food they appropri-
ate, and when many of them together
infest single tree, as one may often
see in the long roadside avenues in CEN
trail France, they succeed in largely
strangling and choking the foliage of
their unhappy host. The pulp sur
rounds a single seed, for whose sake the
whole mechanism has been developed
by the parent plant And this is the OBJ
ject subserved in the shrubs economy
by the sticky material. Mistletoe ber-
ries are much sought after by sundry
fruit-eating birds, but especially by the
mistle thrush, which owes both its
common English name and its scientific
appellation, turdus viscivorus (glue-eat-
ing thrush), to its marked affection for
this mystic food. Now, rs the bird eats
the berries, it gets the seeds entangled
vu its feet and bill by the sticky sur
roundings, and then, flying away to
another tree, it gets rid of them in turn
by rubbing them off sideways on a
fork of the branches. That happens to
be the precise spot that best suits the
young mistletoe as place for sprout-
ing in. If it fell on to the ground be-
meath it would be unable to maintain
itself without the aid of host.-Franl1
Leslie's Monthly.