A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
mistletoe
Mistletoe is a plant that lives on trees. It roots into a branch through a modified structure that taps the host’s water and minerals, while photosynthesizing for itself, so it is a partial parasite rather than a complete one. It grows into a dense ball of forking green stems with paired leathery leaves, and it carries sticky white berries in winter.
Etymology
The Old English name is built from two words and the first of them is mistel, which meant dung. The second is a word for a twig. The reasoning is straightforward once you know how the plant spreads: Birds eat the berries and deposit the seed on a branch in their droppings, and people who watched this happen named the plant for it. So the ceremonial plant of midwinter is, in English, the dung twig.
Notes
The seed is coated in a substance so sticky that a bird has to wipe its beak on a branch to get rid of it, which plants it exactly where it needs to be.