Anything New in the Mistletoe Wars?

Mistletoe is as common in Texas as hackberries, bois d’arcs, and cedar elms. They are, after all, its favorite host trees.

It’s a strange little plant. It’s a green plant, so that means it has chlorophyll and is capable of creating its own sugars during photosynthesis.

But mistletoe is also a parasite. It grows suspended from tree trunks and, especially branches. It sends its roots into the host tree’s wood and pulls water and nutrients out of the tree’s supply lines.

It won’t kill a tree quickly, but mistletoe slowly drags the tree’s vigor down so that long-term drought, heat and cold damage, and any insect and disease problems could all take a more serious toll.

Mistletoe’s berries are favorite foods of birds. They pluck them off and devour them. But the berries are very sticky, and many get stuck to the beaks, feet, and other body parts of the foraging birds. They do their best to wipe them off, and we generally end up finding them sprouting on the bark of small trees’ trunks and limbs.

That’s the time to take action. The young mistletoe plants are very small and they’re not mature enough to bear fruit. It’s easy at that point to take a pole pruner or lopping shears and trim off the entire twig or small branch, mistletoe and all, and let it fall to the ground.

If, on the other hand, a clump has established and has overtaken an entire branch, control may be more difficult. By then the clump looks more like a thicket, perhaps the size of a basketball. Your best hope is just to keep it nipped off annually so you can limit the quantity of fruit it produces. If you’re able to have an entire limb taken down to eliminate a major outbreak, so much the better, but be sure that pruning won’t disfigure the tree permanently.

We still don’t have a spray (herbicide) that will selectively kill mistletoe without doing significant damage to the surrounding branches. Perhaps such a product will eventually come along, but we’re not there yet.

If your neighborhood has a feeling of community, you might survey the mistletoe around you. If it’s widespread, consider a wide-area approach to having a certified arborist do a large-scale removal project. Trimming it out of your trees is great, but if your neighbors all have trees overflowing with its berries, you’re bound to get a new crop almost immediately. Working together you might be able to have more impact.

So that is the story on mistletoe. I may have told you more than I know.