ABOUT DODDER. 



By Charles E. Bessey. 



So much has been said recently about Dodder in the agricultural 

 press that it will be helpful if some of the replies to the inquiries that 

 have come to me are given here essentially as they first appeared in the 

 Breeders Gazette. 



Dodder is a small climbing flowering plant, botanically very nearly 

 related to the morning glories. The theory upon which we explain the 

 dodder is that some morning-glory-like plant ages ago took to the habit 

 of stealing food from the plants en which it climbed. Everybody knows 

 that wild morning-glories climb over all sorts of other plants, twining 

 round them very tightly. Now it is not a very difficult thing to under- 

 stand that a plant under such circumstances might rather easily send 

 a little root into the plant around which it is twining", and then the trouble 

 would begin. Once the plant learned how to steal food in this way I 

 imagine that it would be about as it is with a human being who gets the 

 habit of stealing chickens, corn and other things from his neighbors. 

 At anj^ rate the dodder is structurally like a morning-glory. Its little 

 flowers are really morning-glory flowers, very small it is true, and the 

 little pods are quite like the pods of the morning-gtories. The only differ- 

 ence between the dodder and the morning-glories is that the dodder 

 has no leaves, and yet if you will look very closely you will find that 

 there are vestiges of leaves, and the theory here again is that since the 

 dodder has become a parasite it does not need any leaves, and through 

 disuse they have disappeared. When the dodder seeds fall to the ground 

 they germinate very much as ordinary seeds do, and the tiny root which 

 appears pushes into the ground and fastens itself there quite after the 

 ■fashion of ordinary roots. At the same time the upper part of the plant 

 is twining around such vegetation as it may be able to reach, and if 

 in its reaching after other plants it finds a plant which it likes well 

 enough it sinks its little roots into it and begins to absorb through 

 them rather than through the root which is in the ground. This little 

 root in the ground now being neglected and of no importance to the 

 plant, dries up and from that time on the dodder lives wholly as a para- 

 site. 



My correspondent is quite right when he suggests that if the dodder 

 has no root in the ground it can be eradicated much more readily. 

 That is quite true. Moreover nearly all the dodder plants die when 

 winter comes, unless in the extreme south, where some of the plants 

 may live over; in fact it is found that occasionally in the north a 

 dodder plant which has attacked itself very near to the ground may 



