National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/The Mistletoe

The Mistletoe (Phoradendron flavescens, Pursh, Nutt)


The mistletoe is the only one of the State flowers so far adopted that is parasitic in its habits. And yet, parasite or no parasite, there is no blossom in the catalogue that has more of romance clinging to it than this, Oklahoma's representative in the galaxy of emblematic flowers.

Mistletoe figured in the superstitious rites of the British Druids and in the Nature myths of the Scandinavians. Balder, son of Odin, husband of Nanna, and the darling of all the gods, was so fair that light streamed from him and the whitest flower that blew was likened to him. Once he had a dream of an impending disaster, which caused his mother to put all things, animate and inanimate, under a vow not to harm him. But she omitted one object—the mistletoe. Loki, his enemy, discovers this omission and induces Balder's brother to shoot at him in play with an arrow of mistletoe. It hits the mark and Balder, god of light, dies, becoming thereafter the emblem of purity and innocence.

The mistletoe was then presented to the goddess of love, and it was ordained that whoever passed beneath it should receive a kiss as a token that it was an emblem of love and not of vengeance. The modern Yuletide custom—perhaps more talked about than observed—of kissing the pretty girl under the mistletoe is a survival of those days.

There are more than 400 species of mistletoe, most of them tropical and most of them parasitic. In the United States there are many varieties and they range far and wide, from the New Jersey coast west and south.

If you ask the Oklahoman about the mistletoe as a parasite, he is likely to answer that if man, tapping the maple for sugar, extracting the sap of the rubber tree for automobile tires, and taking the pine tree's turpentine, is a parasite, then the mistletoe may be called one, too; but that otherwise it deserves to be absolved. It has as much right to get its food from trees, he maintains, as we have to eat beef and mutton or wear woolen clothes or silks and satins.

Of all plants the mistletoe has fewest breathing pores in its leaves—only 200 to the square inch, while the lilac has 200,000. The leaves are almost nerveless, thick, and fleshy. When the seeds put out roots, they always turn toward the branch, no matter whether on the upper or the lower side of it.

Traveling through the South, one may see thousands of trees literally festooned with mistletoe, now growing like witches' brooms, now in graceful array, but always calmly appropriating for its own development the life blood of the tree upon which it feeds.

Source: —, ed. (June 1917), “Our State Flowers: The Floral Emblems Chosen by the Commonwealths”, The National Geographic Magazine 31(6): 499. (Illustration from page 514.)