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It’s hard to imagine a holiday season with out Bing Crosby’s Christmas standard I’ll Be Home for Christmas. Originally written from the angle of a soldier stationed overseas for the duration of World War II, his longing for the easy comforts of home and reconnecting along with his cherished ones at Christmas is almost palpable: “Please have snow and mistletoe and items by the tree…”
Mistletoe exact inexplicably feels familiar. Every December, the evergreen sprigs that spent the offseason hidden in our subconscious are all at once all around us. Mistletoe is the long-misplaced acquaintance that we instantly ogle and embrace, but whose backstory has been misplaced to us.
“When I talk to folk about parasitic plants, I do know mistletoe is the one that they’ll immediately ogle even in the occasion that they don’t really understand it’s a parasite,” Virginia Tech plant biologist Jim Westwood tells Popular Science.
Author Washington Irving, most productive acknowledged for The Fable of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle is often credited with helping popularize the parasitic evergreen shrub in the United States. He wrote about the plant in an 1820 collection of brief tales, however the roots of mistletoe scoot much deeper in other places on this planet.
Dating back to Ancient Greece and Rome, leafy mistletoe has long excited the imagination. Mistletoe served as a centerpiece of Celtic Rituals and Norse myths, where it bestowed existence and fertility and served as an aphrodisiac, a plant of parley, an antidote for poisons, and a means of safe passage to and from Hades. According to The Residing Lore, for the reason that plant can thrive in the high branches of its host with out soil, “many cultures saw mistletoe as a sacred plant, existing in liminal spaces between existence and death, earth and sky, and human and divine.”
In Feeble Norse mythology, Baldr, the son of the god Odin and the goddess Frigg, was slain with a mistletoe spear. Some interpretations counsel that, “kissing beneath the mistletoe symbolizes forgiveness, echoing Frigg’s distress and eventual reconciliation with the plant.”
Druid Cutting the Mistletoe on the Sixth Day of the Moon by Henri-Paul Motte (1900). The painting depicts the ritual of oak and mistletoe. Image: Public Domain/Wikimedia Commons CC By 4.0.
Many early physicians and scientists saw mistletoe as a cure-all for the woes of the arena. It was veteran to treat various diseases and conditions including epilepsy, infertility, and ulcers.
In Pliny’s Natural History, the author and physician describes the Celtic ritual of oak and mistletoe. Excessive priests dressed in white harvested mistletoe with golden sickles from the branches of sacred oak bushes to make an elixir that may perhaps counteract any poison and render any barren animal fertile.
“It’s easy to imagine how folk change into fixated on mistletoe plants,” says Westwood. “It stays green all chilly weather rising in its host tree. It almost looks to have supernatural powers.”
Supernatural or no longer, mistletoe was so popular for the duration of the 19th and the early twentieth century, that its seasonal availability was tracked and reported by many newspapers. There was little wild mistletoe to be plucked from bushes in or around a typical metropolis, so it was often imported from down south where it was a welcome interloper on account of its predictable seasonal payout.
“That’s type of an attention-grabbing thing about mistletoe,” Carolee Bull, a plant pathologist at Penn State and president of The American Phytopathological Society, tells Popular Science “Individuals wanted to manage it because it’s parasitic, however they also wanted it as a product to sell.”
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Mistletoe, the plant parasite
Common or leafy mistletoes (Viscum species in Europe and Phoradendron species in the United States) are evergreen parasitic shrubs. They have small leathery green leaves and white, translucent or crimson berries depending on the species. Without a perennial woody host plant to enhance them, mistletoe would rapidly die.
Nonetheless, no longer all parasitic plants are created equal. Leafy mistletoes are considered hemiparasites. “It’s taking primarily water and vitamins from the tree it’s rising on, however it can make some of its gain meals because its leaves serene contain chlorophyll,” says Westwood. “Because they are green, you wouldn’t necessarily ogle them as parasites.”
A woman buys mistletoe at a stall at the Christmas market in the main pedestrian boulevard in Hamburg, Germany. Image: Philipp Guelland/Getty Images.
Mistletoe plants are poisonous as effectively. They contain one or extra peptide toxins— particularly concentrated in the leaves and stems—capable of causing heart and gastrointestinal concerns in various animals including humans. They also have been reported to cause dermatitis. European Viscum species are considered extra toxic because of the the presence of viscumin, a toxin similar to ricin from castor bean that is just not any longer latest of their American Phoradendron counterparts. Regardless of their deadly reputation, most reported accidental ingestions (e.g. a few leaves or berries), with the exception of ugly, concentrated herbal exercise, such as brewing mistletoe in tea, have no longer been fatal.
Within the thirteenth century, German Dominican friar and scientist Albertus Magnus, was among the first to formally ogle and document European leafy mistletoe (Viscum album) as a plant parasite. Magnus even went as far to suggest pruning contaminated branches as a invent of control, helping lay the foundation for the field of plant pathology.
“Loads of the work we attain as plant pathologists is runt,” says Bull.
