When the greenery and other decorations were being taken down on the traditional date recently, a friend admitted that, after about 10 years of sweat, he had given up trying to grow the parasite mistletoe. Why did he want to do it in the first place? For the hell of it, for pig-iron as some put it, and because, well, just because. He had read expert advice in half-a-dozen books and all made more or less than same points. Keep the sprigs with the berries (which contain the seed) in a paper bag in a cool place until May. Then you cut a flap of bark from the selected host-tree, squeeze the berry and its seed under the flap, where the stickiness of the berry is extra protection and holds the seed in the aperture, then close the flap of bark. Do this on the underside of the branch chosen and you are away with it.
Our friend has never seen even a shoot or leaf of the damned thing. One tip that is not realisable if you buy your mistletoe in shops is that it helps if your seed is planted into the same sort of tree from which your specimen came. As most of us buy it in shops, and as the greater part of that is imported from the Continent, who is to know? Apple is a favourite host. Hawthorn, too, is recommended: mountain ash, and ash, birch, lime, pear. Findings at the East Malling Research Station in England, writes Tony Venables in a recent Country Life, say that slits cut into year-old shoots on a tree give best results. In this case it was apple. Even if the seed takes, you may have little to show for a couple of years. Richard Mabey in his massive Flora Britannica writes about the aphrodisiac reputation of the parasite and tell us that "it is worth pondering that, at least until the 1960s, the inclusion of mistletoe in church decoration was frowned on in many parishes." And he goes on to say that early people, "especially the fearful medievals", saw mistletoe as entirely magical - a plant without roots or obvious sources of food, that grew away above the earth and stayed green-leafed when other plants were bare.
Further to the aphrodisiac/ reproduction line, he notes, women who wished to conceive would tie a sprig round their waists or wrists. You wouldn't think the English needed to import from Normandy or Brittany, for Mabey tells us that there is a long tradition of mistletoe being grown on apple trees in England. At one time mistletoe was found on no less than 34 percent of apple trees in Herefordshire orchards. But it was a long time ago. All authorities agree that, whatever Druidic connections may be made with the plant, the oak is one tree which seldom hosts mistletoe. Y