54 FROM AN EASY CHAIR 



and the Paraguay tea belong, but it must not be 

 confused with the evergreen oak to which the name 

 Quercus ilex is given on account of the resemblance of 

 its leaves to those of a holly. 



The mistletoe (or mistil-tan, the pale branch, in 

 Anglo-Saxon) is a pale-coloured, small-flowered member 

 of a great family of parasitic plants, the Loranthaceae. 

 They all live upon trees, and draw a part of their 

 nourishment from the juices of the tree into which their 

 rootlets penetrate. The tropical allies of the mistletoe 

 are very beautiful plants, with fine bunches of brilliantly- 

 coloured flowers and broad handsome green leaves. 

 Our mistletoe is most commonly found parasitic on 

 apple trees and poplar trees. It occurs on nearly all 

 our trees, but is very rare on the oak. A careful 

 inquiry some time ago resulted in the discovery of only 

 seven oaks in all England on which mistletoe was 

 growing. The Druids took their sacred mistletoe from 

 the sacred oak tree on account of its rarity. To them 

 it was a charm against infertility and sterility, and, 

 according to Pliny, was cut and distributed at the new 

 year with great ceremony and the sacrifice of heifers. 

 Its paired white berries contains a viscid fluid which 

 gives it its botanical name Viscum album and causes 

 the seeds to adhere to the beaks of birds and thus to 

 be transported to a distance and introduced by the 

 birds' attempts to wipe their beaks into the cracks of 

 the bark of trees, in which the seeds germinate. 



The white-berried mistletoe is the only English kind, 

 and red mistletoe seems altogether out of character. 

 But a red-berried species (Viscum cruciatum) is parasitic 

 on the olive tree in Spain, North Africa, and Syria. 

 Curiously enough, though the white-berried mistletoe is 

 excommunicated by the Western Christian Church 

 on account of its use in pagan worship, the red-berried 

 mistletoe was gathered from olive trees in the Garden of 

 Gethsemane and in the enclosure of the Holy Sepulchre 



