Why would you want to grow misletoe anyway? Answer: just for the hell of it, and because you have failed many times. And you have failed because the best information, given in respectable publications, left out one essential. They all advise you to keep the berries on the twig and hung up in a paper bag in cool and dry, but frost proof conditions, or put into sand until needed, in spring weather.
You do it, and you press the berries at the correct time into the underside of the branch of a suitable host tree (apple and thorn are preferred) in a crevice, or, indeed you make a nick with your knife, or even lift a flange of bark with the same, and wait, and wait. The first year, say the authorities, the seed takes root, the third year it shows a pair of leaves and in the fourth year branches. Fine. This has been done again and again. The trees are riddled with crevices and flanges of bark. Not a sprout.
But now comes the answer. The luck has had to change, you hope. A correspondent, one J. G. of Tipperary has written to the English Field saying that he lives in mistletoe country but neither he nor his friends with garden ing interests have been able to grow it. The Country Queries Editor, Christina Grindon gets to the heart of the matter by saying in the first line "Berries from cut mistletoe cannot be used to propagate this plant; they must be taken from healthy growing specimens only."
There is another factor. "Moreover, use berries which have been growing on the same species of tree as the one you intend to grow mistletoe on." What you must do is to cover the berries on your growing plant, if you can find one, with a muslin bag. This, well before Christmas, and obviously to protect them from birds. You pick the berries at the end of March when they are really ripe and then press them into the appropriate crevice or notch. The skin of the berry must be broken and the juice and seeds well rubbed in. It might be wise, she suggests, to tie some moss over it for protection.
You won't see much for a year, but if it takes, there will be a swelling under the bark and in the following March or April some green shoots will appear. But from then on it's very slow. And you should have chosen a thickish branch, for the mistletoe is a parasite, and lives off the host. And can be come very heavy. That will be the day! First find your live, growing mistletoe.