ON THE WILD SIDE Have a berry Christmas

CHRISTMAS is nearly here and your house should be decorated by now. So get ready to begin the festive tradition of kissing underneath a voracious, toxic parasite. Don’t worry – I will explain. Today I’m going to ramble on about two plants that we use as festive decorations – holly and mistletoe.

These plants have a lot in common. They are both green all year and have berries around Christmas. They have male and female plants, and only the female ones have berries. They are also both favourite foods of the mistle thrush and other thrushes. Both were hung in houses to protect them from witches and demons. Each of them is incredibly poisonous, too, with holly berries being dangerous and every part of the mistletoe being potentially lethal.

Holly is a hardy, long-living British tree with sharp, spiny leaves. The leaves get sharper the closer they are to the ground to protect the plant from any animals who might see them as a tasty snack. They are much smoother towards the top. Holly was traditionally planted in gardens as it was thought it couldn’t be struck by lightning and this would protect the house.

Mistletoe cannot live in the ground. Instead, it’s a parasite that drills into trees and steals their nutrients. Mistletoe grows into huge, green spheres that keep their leaves when the host’s have been shed, so they become much more obvious in the winter. The balls can grow a metre wide.

Mistletoe is coated in a sticky substance that attaches itself to birds’ beaks and feathers, and the bark of host trees. Despite being harmful to the tree they inhabit, they are beneficial to the environment – as well as feeding birds, there are six species of insect in the UK that exclusively eat mistletoe.