Jasper County Democrat, Volume 5, Number 37, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 December 1902 — How Mistletoe Comes to Be. [ARTICLE]

How Mistletoe Comes to Be.

The story of how the mistletoe gets on the trees is a inoat interesting one. Covering the mistletoe twigs are pearly white berries. These come in the winter season, when food is comparatively scarce, and hence some of our birds eat them freely. Now, when a robin eats a cherry he swallows simply the meat and flips the stone away. The seed of the mistletoe the bird cannot flip. It is sticky and holds to his bill. His only resource is to wipe It off, and he does so, leaving it sticking to the branches of the tree on which he is sitting at the time. This seed sprouts after a time, and not finding earth —which Indeed Its ancestral habit has made it cease wanting—it sinks its roots Into the bark of the tree and hunts there for the pipes that carry the sap. Now the sap in the bark is the very richeet in the tree, far richer than in the wood, and the mistletoe gets from its host the choicest of food. With a strnnge foresight it does not throw ite leaves away, as do moat pnfnsites, hut keeps them to use In winter, when the tree la leafless. —Ladies' Home Journal.