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Mistletoe might well be spelled "missile toe," for its first tiny rootlets have the power to insinuate themselves into the host tree's living tissues like the fangs of a vampire. Its pallid, waxy berries, resembling seed pearls, are carried by birds and dropped into bark crevices where they germinate under protection of their own gum.* Mistletoe cannot live in soil but must steal its nourishment from a host tree's sap veins. Where it fastens on, grotesque swellings ensue and the host's deformed members writhe away from the vampire as if in horror. No amount of chopping-out short of limb amputation will eradicate the mature bushes. Fortunately for trees, and for the human kissing custom, and for Oklahoma whose State "flower" mistletoe is, the deaths it inflicts are slow and painless. Its glaucous clumps aloft even confer a macabre beauty upon the elms, hackberries, walnuts, gums, pecans, mesquites, and (rarely) oaks which it reduces to skeletons. Mistletoes abound from lower New Jersey to Key West, all across the South, and up the west coast into Oregon. In much of this range they are accompanied by an even more picturesque growth called Spanish Moss, a member of the pineapple family. This stringy, grayish stuff hanging from trees, making them look like shaggy Arthur Rackham wizards, is not a true parasite. It is a typical air plant, of which lichens and orchids are other examples. Air plants do not suck a tree's life-juices but can, like the vines mentioned in Chapter II, smother it to death if allowed to run rampant. Another conspicuous parasite, this a true one, is called witches'-broom. It shows up as dense, deforming twig clumps in hackberry, larch, and honey locust. It is caused by the sting of gall mites or by spores of a mildew fungus— maybe by both. Pruning is the only cure, if there is any. |
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