Current Affairs , Gardening , Mistletoe , Orchard , Religion , social history , Travel

All Mistletoe’s Eve?

by: Jonathan BriggsPosted on:

All Hallows’ Eve, and the mistletoe is ripening… Not that it’s got anything to do with Halloween of course, other than being a mysterious plant, a symbol of pagan tradition and a portent of the dark winter months. Which is, I s‘pose, quite a lot. But with November dawning tomorrow we’ll soon be right back into mistletoe season. So I think it’s fair to say this is Mistletoe’s Eve too. Actually, mistletoe season never quite […]

Biodiversity , Current Affairs , Mistletoe , Orchard , Science , social history

The Mistletoe that’s also a Christmas Tree

by: Jonathan BriggsPosted on:

Australia has many varieties of mistletoe, valuable for contributing (directly and indirectly) to local biodiversity and also well-known for their Mistletoe Birds which specialise in spreading mistletoe seeds. But the oddest (and biggest) of them all is the Western Australian Christmas Tree – yes, that’s a tree, and it really is called a Christmas Tree – which is one of the few mistletoe species that’s adapted to parasitize its host’s roots, not its branches. So Nuytsia floribunda, […]

Biodiversity , Mistletoe , Science , social history , Travel

Back to the First Contact (with parasitic plants – though not mistletoe)

by: Jonathan BriggsPosted on:

I went back in time, sort-of, last summer when I re-visited the scene of my First Contact – with parasitic plants, not aliens. But not mistletoe – this was a different parasite… Randan Wood, near Dodford in Worcestershire, was where I first saw Ivy Broomrape, Orobanche hederae, a root parasite of Ivy.  The occasion was sometime in the mid 1970s when I would have been about 14. The day was a little unusual – a […]

Current Affairs , Mistletoe , social history

The Mistletoe Rustlers

by: Jonathan BriggsPosted on:

Mistletoe rustling is, even today, rife at this time of year – but it was once much more common. The huge popularity of mistletoe from the mid 19th to mid 20th centuries gave it a rather higher financial value than it has today. In 2012 I posted a newspaper cutting about one theft, in 1887, and since then I’ve come across many dozens of others, from the 1860s onwards. Here are a few examples – which […]