The Birmingham age-herald., 1909-03-14
MIsTLEToE BoUGH.
Some of the Old Legends That Sur.
 round the Christmas Plant.

From the London Globe.
 Now that even the latest winter apples are gathered safely to the shelter of the loft and winds and frost have stripped their foliage from the orchard trees, the glossy mistletoe shines out once more, after it's long seclusion in the summer greenery, and shows conspicuously on the naked boughs. To many farmers of the orchard counties 1t is itself no neg ligible item in the harvest of the year, for in good times bad the Christmas bunch of mistletoe maintains it's market price Our childhoods teaching of the Druids' mystic dealings with the oak and mistletoe has left on many minds an er- roneous impression that 1t is mostly on the branches of the monarch of the woods that mistletoe is found; whereas 1t was the very rare instances of the con- junction between the two that gave the special sanctity to mistetoe when found upon an oak. Of many trees on which this parasite plant grows freely the ap pie is perhaps in England Its favorite home; but few orchards of Devon or Worcestershire can show so profuse a winter verdure as may be seen along the banks of the Loire, in fair Touraine, where the lines of poplars are often so thickly draped with the plant that it al- most appears their natural foliage The apricot tree in India, the vine In Italy and the spruce fir in Switzerland all lend the mistletoe home.
 How came the mistetoe to draw it's life, a feeble hanger-on, from other trees? We may, If we so will. accept the old Morse legend which tells how Balder the Beautiful, being slain by an arrow of mistetoe wood aimed by a jealous hand. his sorrowing mother Friga decreed that the fatal tree should grow on earth no more. According to another version of the story, however. Friga, in weaving the magic spell which made the god invulner- able to all that grew on earth, In the air or In the sea, overlooked the mistletoe as being too insignificant to fear, and hence the fatal result. Friga at the same time instituted beneath its spray the kiss of peace which in modern times be- come a salutation of a warmer kind But the hanging of the Christmas mistle- toe is with us more probably survival from the Druids days, when the sacred spray, cut with golden sickle from the oak, was after certain rites divided among the people and hung before their doors as shelter for the gods. In Chris tian legends the mistletoe was held &C., cursed as being wood of which the cross was made, on which account it was de- graded from a lordly tree to be hence forth a parasite-a belief that accounts for it's exclusion from the Christmas dec orations of a church.
 The mistltoe possesses it's full share of vegetable virtues, real or mythical In Sweden a ring made from its wood acts as a charm against disease, while a bough of mstltoe carried in the hand will show the bearer ghosts-which somc might think a doubtful benefit. The Druids looked upon 1t as a veritable 'heal all" and even in the more recent times a decoction of the plant was deemed a cure for such widely varying evils as strains and toothache, hydrophobia, and a sore. In West of England farms the COW which was the first to calve in the new year was made to eat a branch of mistletoe, a custom which seems somewhat akin to the "wassailing" of the cattle on Twelfth Night of which so many Herefordshire farmsteads were the scene.
 On the other hand the mistletoe has been generally held as harmful to the tree upon whose branch it-grows. But nowa- days we find excuse, or even good word, for many a malefactor of the past, and mistletoe is not outside the pale. A re- cent writer in a horticultural paper has given it as his opinion that upon old and cankered trees the parasite may perhaps do actual good by drawing out the dis eased sap and even in healthy trees pro- vide a wholesome outlet for the super abundant energy of too vigorous growth And, this theory fitting in hap oily with the policy of laissez faire. on which so many of our orchards are still worked we may hope that any wholesale destruction of the mistletoe Is still far off.