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It is possible for a Cuscuta plant to work destruction over a space two meters in diameter in a lucern or clover field; so, should a hundred seeds germinate in an acre, it may be easily seen how disastrous the effects of the scourge would prove.
The genus Cuscuta embraces more than eighty species, which are distributed throughout the entire world, but which are not so abundant in cold as in warm regions. La Nature. It is commonly said that there is a great difference between the transpiration and evaporation of water in plants.
BIND-WEED. The poor people use the root of this plant fresh gathered and boiled in ale as a cathartic; and it is found generally to answer that purpose. It would, however, nauseate a delicate stomach; but for people of strong constitutions there is not a better medicine. CUSCUTA europaea.
When a seed of Cuscuta, germinates, no cotyledons are to be distinguished. This peculiarity, however, the plant has in common with other parasites, and even with some plants, such as orchids, that vegetate normally. At this point there forms a prolongation of the tissue of the dodder a sort of cone, which penetrates the stalk of the host plant.
By the cottages was abundance of shepherd's-purse, Lepidium, and balsams, with dock, Galeopsis, and Cuscuta. The fact is an important one, as barley requires a mean summer temperature of 48 degrees to come to maturity.
A man must indeed love knowledge deeply before he can make others love it, or render it easy and attractive, revealing only the smiling highways; and Fabre, above all things the impassioned professor, was the very man to lead his disciples "between the hedges of hawthorn and sloe," whether to show them the sap, "that fruitful current, that flowing flesh, that vegetable blood," or how the plant, by a mysterious transubstantiation, makes its wood, "and the delicate bundle of swaddling-bands of its buds," or how "from a putrid ordure it extracts the flavour and the fragrance of its fruits"; or whether he seeks to evoke the murderous plants that live as parasites at the cost of others; the white Clandestinus, "which strangles the roots of the alders beside the rivers," the Cuscuta, "which knows nothing of labour," the wicked Orobanche, plump, powerful and brazen, the skin covered with ugly scales, "with sombre flowers that wear the livery of death, which leaps at the throat of the clover, stifling it, devouring it, sucking its blood."
On the hill-side were creeping brambles, lovely yellow, purple, pink, and white primroses, white-flowered Thalictrum and Anemone, berberry, Podophyllum, white rose, fritillary, Lloydia, etc. These formed a rank and dense herbaceous, mostly annual vegetation, six feet high, bound together with Cuscuta, climbing Leguminosae, and Ceropegia.
It is also used to dye woollens of a red colour. CUSCUTA europaea. DODDER. The herb gives out a lightish red. CRATAEGUS Oxycantha. HAWTHORN. The bark of this plant, with copperas, is used by the Highlanders to dye black. DATISCA cannabina. BASTARD-HEMP. This produces a yellow; but is not easily fixed, therefore it presently fades to a light tinge. DELPHINIUM Consolida.
Their petticoats, for instance, were composed of the fox-glove, a flower in demand among Irish fairies for their gloves, and in some parts of that country for their caps, where it is nicknamed "Lusmore," while the Cuscuta epithymum is known in Jersey as "fairies' hair."
"Carnivorous plants, perhaps, as the fly-trap and the bog sundew." "And why not the humbler cuscuta, the dodder, the cuttlefish of the vegetable kingdom, which shoots out the antennæ of its stems as fine as thread, attaching itself to other plants by tiny suckers and feeding greedily on their juices?" asked the Abbé Gévresin.
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