In my quest to find out which native plants are host plants for butterflies, I found out one of them is Desert Mistletoe. When I saw a photo of the butterfly that uses it for a host, I realized I photographed one of them last year without realizing what it was!
I brought up the image; looked closer at the branch he was sitting on and darned if there weren’t sprigs of Desert Mistletoe. Pretty cool 🙂 Here’s a closer shot of the Desert Mistletoe sprigs. It’s on a Foothill Palo Verde.
That’s a good interpretation of what looks like a whole new plant arising from the bark. But what you’re seeing there is a cluster of secondary leaves growing from an old node. If you had taken a photo of the same spot last year (or maybe the year before), you would have seen a single leaf arising from that node. But in subsequent years, multiple leaves will grow from the same node. The clincher? Leaflets. Desert mistletoe has little tiny pointed leaves at the nodes.
Have you noticed the extreme sparseness of flowers on the local foothill palos verdes this year? It looks like the antithesis of 1991, when the palos verdes flowers were remarkable. I still have a jar of dried flowers I gathered up off the driveway that year.
Pondering the paucity, I wondered what (if anything) might be causing it – continued drought? A cool spring? No hard freeze? Whatever the cause, it’s going to be a bad year for rodents. They won’t have their traditional source of seed to gather, so their populations will likely crash.
Thanks for the clarification on the mistletoe, Steve! That tells me that just pulling off the Mistletoe doesn’t fully get rid of it. I have a couple of trees in my yard that I pull plants from every year. And yes…I had noticed the lack of blooms on the PVs and had recalled that it had happened before. All very, very interesting!
My education continues. Thanks so much!