Mistletoe

European mistletoe is an evergreen shrub that lives as a hemiparasite on the branches of trees such as apple, lime, hawthorn and poplar, drawing water and nutrients from its host. It is native to Europe and to western and southern Asia, and is found only rarely in North America, where it was introduced. Its forked stems carry pairs of leathery, strap-shaped, yellowish-green leaves and tiny flowers of the same colour, followed by sticky white or yellow berries that each hold a single seed; the berry juice was once made into birdlime for trapping small birds. Pre-Christian Europe read it as a sign of the male life force and so of fertility, and it is thought to be the golden bough of Aeneas, while Greek myth gave it to heroes passing into the underworld. Pliny described Gaulish druids cutting it from oak with a golden sickle on the sixth day of the moon, and in Norse myth it is the one thing that swore no oath to spare Baldr, and so the thing that killed him. In Germany, England, Wales and France a sprig was kept in the house for luck and changed each Yule, and kissing beneath it at Christmas is recorded from sixteenth-century England. In magical practice it is carried against lightning, illness and misfortune, laid in cradles so fairies cannot swap the child for a changeling, carried by women hoping to conceive, and burned to drive out evil.