I took these pictures of American mistletoe in November 2003 at Bombay Hook National Wildlife Refuge here in Delaware (mid-Atlantic U.S.) The host plant is a red maple (Acer rubrum), I think.
This is my first post here, but I've been enjoying the Botany Photo of the Day for a long time.
No, there was nobody under it but me. The tree was growing in shallow water (it seems that mistletoe grows lower in such trees) so they would have had to get their feet wet to be there. I wanted the pictures enough to get wet for them!
Around here we have Arceuthobium on some hemlocks. It deforms the branches, making a swelling and branchlet proliferation where it has rooted into the branch. (Parasites are sure creepy, aren't they?). If you can get up to where you can see the top side of a branch so dis-organized there are tiny tufts of dwarf mistletoe sticking out of the top. Eventually I noticed a tree right down the street was infested. I could see the dwarf mistletoe from the road. That hemlock is gone now.
I've seen quantities of Phoradendron on oaks in California, but those up here are spared this indignity.
