“You don’t want to buy that lot—the trees have mistletoe!” Our realtor pointed at a shrubby mass growing among the branches high in the Ponderosa pine.
It didn’t look anything like the mistletoe I was familiar with, coming from California. There, the live oaks often support huge masses of mistletoe. And neither plant resembled the old plastic “mistletoe sprig” I inherited from my parents, that we hung in our doorway at Christmastime to encourage kissing. Curious, I did some research. It turns out that there are hundreds, if not thousands of barely-related species of parasitic plants called mistletoe.
Last summer we took a drive to Granby, just outside of Rocky Mountain National Park. While I had heard about the Mountain Pine Beetle for years, I was unprepared for the extent of the devastation. Entire mountainsides were covered in dead and dying pines, eerily resembling New England’s beautiful red fall foliage. But rather than deciduous maples and other hardwoods, these were conifers, largely ponderosas. They wouldn’t be turning green again come spring.
Mountain Plover 