There’s a new, multi-authored, mistletoe paper just published in Journal of Ecology, which has been years in the making! It’s part of the British Ecological Society’s long-running series ‘Biological Flora of the British Isles‘, in which every paper covers the biology and autecology of just one species. In this case mistletoe, Viscum album. You can read the promotional blog (How green is kissing under the mistletoe?) about it on the Journal website here, but don’t go away thinking that the paper’s all about kissing, there’s hardly any smooching but lots about everything else.
I volunteered to author, or at least co-author, this particular paper many many (well over 10, maybe even 20) years ago, but it’s only been in the last three years that it’s actually taken shape – co-authored and catalysed by Peter Thomas of the School of Life Sciences, Keele University here in the UK, Monika Dering of the Faculty of Forestry and Wood Technology, Poznań University of Life Sciences, Poznań, Poland, Marian Giertych, Grzegorz Iszkuło, Dominik Tomaszewski – all from the Institute of Dendrology, Polish Academy of Sciences, Kórnik, Poland and myself (not formally part of any institution, though I do take full advantage of my renewed student status at the Open University) in the UK.
I’m really really pleased it’s finally out, and very grateful for the collaboration and fellow authors (none of whom I’ve met) that brought it about. I think we did mistletoe proud. And it complements, as a more formal scientific paper, my broad-based single-author paper reviewing mistletoe published a year ago in December 2021.
Now that those papers are out of the way maybe it’s time for me to sit down, take stock, and start work on that (bigger) mistletoe book I’ve also been planning for years…
Links to the new paper (and also last year’s):
Biological Flora of Britain and Ireland No. 303: Viscum album Peter A. Thomas, Monika Dering, Marian J. Giertych, Grzegorz Iszkuło, Dominik Tomaszewski and Jonathan Briggs Journal of Ecology Dec 2022,
- website version: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2745.14036
- pdf version: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/1365-2745.14036
Mistletoe,Viscum album (Santalaceae), in Britain and Ireland: a discussion and review of current status and trends Jonathan Briggs British & Irish Botany Dec 2021 3(4): 419-454
- website: https://doi.org/10.33928/bib.2021.03.419
- pdf: https://www.britishandirishbotany.org/index.php/bib/article/view/108/139
Want your own mistletoe? Grow your own with a Mistletoe Grow-Kit from the English Mistletoe Shop.