Trader Joe's Real Mistletoe: a study in realness

This holiday Trader Joe's have been selling 'Real Mistletoe' in cute little old fashion-inspired boxes.  On the back of each box is stated "Our real mistletoe is hand harvested in the Pacific Northwest. Perserved naturally, it will last all season long. Hand from a doorway and steal a kiss from your sweetie!"

Trader Joe's Real Mistletoe. Photo © Botanical Accuracy.

Now, the first question we would ask, is of course, is it real? Well, it is a product of nature.  The plant inside the box is a real dried plant, not something molded and plastic.  So yes, it is real. (Of course plastic is also real, formed by atoms and electrons and chemical bonds, etc.  It all depends of your definition of 'real'. 

However, this is a dried plant dipped in paint. There is no information of what the paint contains, neither does it say anywhere on the package that the mistletoe is painted.  Instead it says 'preserved naturally' on the back of the package.  That brings us into the sticky territory of "what is natural?".  There are a lot of natural things in the world that we usually do not associate with the marketing term 'natural', such as uranium radiation, cancer, gold, DNA mutations, strychnine, and methane. Natural simply means it is something that exist in nature by itself, something we humans haven't created. There is no legal definition of natural.  There is no way to know if humans created this green paint on this mistletoe, or the dye or paint was mixed by 'natural ingredients'.  So, this is just another case of the use of 'natural' in marketing in a way that is ambiguous and uncertain. One thing is for certain though, a normal (natural) mistletoe has a greenish yellow or yellowish greenish color, and is never this dark green. Trader Joe's helped nature a bit with the color here.

Mistletoe dipped in paint. Photo © Botanical Accuracy.

Second, is it real mistletoe?   Now it becomes a bit tricky.  This is a mistletoe indeed, and mistletoes belong to a large group of species in the plant order Santalales.  The one historically associated with Christmas is the European species Viscum album, but it has cultural and mythological references all the way back to Viking times). The plant in the Trader Joe box is a mistletoe, but it is not Viscum album.  It is a species of Phoradendron, but which one is hard to determine due to the green paint on the leaves and flower buds. Several species of Phoradendron exist in the United States, and this is likely Phoradendron leucarpum (Santalaceae), which indeed is used as a Christmas substitute here in the United States. (It was ID'd with help from the Facebook group Plant Identification (intermediate-advanced) - Thank you!)

Phoradendron leucocarpum, not Viscum album. Photo © Botanical Accuracy.

So, in conclusion, is this real mistletoe?

Yes, it is a real plant, but painted. Yes, it is mistletoe, but not the species that is historically associated with Christmas kisses.  As usual, what is real really depends on your definition. And yes, it is a real mistletoe, a plant from the mistletoe order. Would I hang up this dried painted breakable mistletoe in my house?  Never. In my mind, this is not at all the real mistletoe of old Christmas traditions.

For more on botanical accuracies and inaccuracies on mistletoes, here is a link to a post from earlier, explaining the difference between mistletoes and hollies.

Teasels tousled with thistles

Thistles are such familiar plants to most of us, these spiky, thorny, sharp-leaved plants with fuzzy purple or pink, or less commonly yellow, flower heads.  We love them and hate them, as they are both beloved and tasty plants (artichoke, the Scottish symbol) and less liked since they can be weedy and sometimes invasive.  They get around with their little fruits attached to a pappus-umbrella of hairs that act like a parachute for long-distance dispersal.  Thistles are well-known and common in popular media and literature.

'Thistle clipart' search on Google yields this result - these are all thistles.
Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

Most of the plantswe call thistles belong to Asteraceae (the sunflower family) and form their own group (a tribe called Cardueae (=older name) or Cynareae).  In this group you have genera and species such as Arctium (burdock), Carduus, Carthamus (safflower), Centaurea (knapweeds, corn flower, star thistle), Cirsium, Cynara (artichoke, cardoon), Echinops (Globe thistle), Onopordum, and Silybium (milk thistle).

A typical thistle flower looks like this:

Thistle, probably Cirsium. 
Photo from United Kingdom, by John Cooke on Flickr (Creative Commons).

The problem is the teasels (Dipsacus).  They are in the family Dipsacaceae, not too far away from Asteraceae's thistles, but certainly not true thistles, but they look a bit like them and get confused with them a lot.  Teasels also have large heads of small flowers and are plants that look ferocious with spines.  The teasel itself got its name from that the flower heads were used to tease out the wool before spinning (carding). Several teasels are invasive in the United States and you often see them along highways in  disturbed ditches and on road banks. Their flowering heads dry beautifully into gorgeous botanical stalks for flower arrangements.

A typical teasel look like this:

Teasel, Dipsacus.
Photo by Bev Currie on Flickr (Creative Commons).

So, can you tell teasels and thistles apart? Thistles have many (involucral) bracts below the flower head that form a cup below the flowers.  In teasels, there are just a few long bracts that stick out below the flower head.  The teasels have lots of sharp parts in the actual flower head, so the flower head looks like a spiny ball the whole season. In thistles, the bracts below the flower stays, but there are no persistent spiny parts inside among the flowers themselves.  The fruits, which are little nut-like, single-seeded achenes have a feathery pappus for wind-dispersal in thistles, but are naked in teasels.  Good teasel photos are available on invasive.org.

As usual for some of these misunderstandings and misapplications, the stock photo market is abundant with incorrectly identified plants.  There seems to be no taxonomic quality control of what photos actually show and what they are labeled on places like iStockphoto, Colourbox, and Getty Images.  For plants this is especially disturbing since commercial companies and media buy representative photos of that they think are thistles, poppies, and chamomile, and then use them in good faith. Unfortunately, this is a major reason why botanical inaccuracies are propagated and also the media companies paid for something they didn't got.  (The problems with chamomile images are especially abundant, but that is for a later post.) 


Here are some teasels that are labeled as thistles on stock photos for sale: 

Teasels presented as thistles on gettyimages (link).
Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

More teasels listed as 'thistle plant', this time on Colourbox (link).
Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

Dried flowering heads sold as 'dried thistle' by Country Creations (link).
Screenshot by BotanicalAccuracy.com.