Mango Mistletoe
That the mistletoe has medicinal properties, shouldn’t have been lost on any reader of Asterix comics. Getafix needed sprigs of mistletoe to make magic potion for the inhabitants of that little Gaulish village, we knew so well.
And some 2,000 years ago, the druids in what is now Britain venerated the plant when it grew on an oak. When they found it, they dressed in white, harvested it with a golden sickle, and sacrificed two white bulls. Or so says that great Roman, Pliny the Elder, in his “Natural History.” The druids — Pliny continues — believed that mistletoe could make barren animals fecund, and that it was an antidote to all poisons — Olivia Judson writes in The Hemi-Parasite Season.
Turns out, there are tropical mistletoe species as well. One kind festoons mango trees. Being partially parasitic, these plants draw nourishment from their hosts and, sometimes, end up killing them. But the mistletoe does nourish a host of other species ranging from birds to elephants with its flowers, fruits, and leaves, so it is often considered a keystone species (any species with disproportionate influence relative to its abundance. If it goes, the ecosystem collapses.)
The mango mistletoe is full of phenolic compounds which makes them antioxidants or quenchers of free radicals. They also seem to be potent against microbes.
Scientists have discovered a new species of mistletoe in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands of India and named it Scurulla Paramjitji. It can be hard to find some species of mistletoe because their leaves tend to mimic the appearance of the host tree.