A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1190 entries
dodder
Dodder is a parasitic vine that looks like someone has thrown orange or yellow thread over a field. It has no useful leaves and almost no chlorophyll. A seedling germinates in soil, finds a host plant, twines around the stem, and drives small pegs into it to tap the host’s water and sugar, and once that connection is made the dodder’s own root withers and it loses contact with the ground entirely.
Etymology
The word is Middle English and its further origin is not established, though it has relatives in Dutch and German for the same plant. English collected a long list of other names for it, which together give a fair picture of how people felt about finding it in a crop: strangleweed, devil’s guts, witch’s hair, hellbine, and, from a gentler direction, love vine and angel’s hair. The Latin, Cuscuta, appears to have come into medieval Latin from Arabic.
Notes
A dodder seedling does not find its host by chance. Experiments have shown that it grows toward airborne chemicals given off by particular plants and will choose a tomato over a wheat seedling when offered both, following the scent with no leaves and no eyes and only a few days of stored food to do it in. Some species also move genetic material back and forth with their hosts.