afdexter's Identifications

Budding and about to flower. Status update on a plant previously recorded. Sadly, Parks and Grounds has trashed this plant; most of its leaves have been hacked off; branches of the tree that supported another bush of this species have been hacked off; there are now no graceful festoons of leaves. I fully expect that sooner or later - probably later - Brisbane City Council's so-called park maintenance contractors will destroy this lovely mistletoe altogether.. and with it will go the Scarlet Jezebel butterflies that use it as a host tree. Our City council doesn't seem to like or support native biodiversity in our local suburban parks! The less of that the better, seems to be their motto. More dyschoriste, less of everything else.

In full bloom.... sadly, a whole branch of it, flowers and all, seems to have been ripped out/ hacked off and dumped below the tree. There would have been twice as much as this but three-quarters of the original plant was hacked off the tree - I assume by Council's ecologically-abysmally-ignorant 'park maintenance' people, last year - to do this they hacked a lot of branches off the bottle tree. This is easily the most beautiful thing in an otherwise supremely dull and ugly suburban 'pocket "park"'; and last year (when it had festoons of leaves) I found numerous Scarlet Jezebel butterfly caterpillars feeding on the leaves. What's left is about 1/5 of the original plant.. which will support very few scarlet jezebel caterpillars... assuming of course that the entire plant is not targeted to be killed/ Removed, because some damnfool doesn't 'get' that Orange Mistletoe is a beautiful native habitat plant and is NOT at all common in our part of Greater Brisbane. But in our bleak Brisbarren such things are Not Wanted and Not Allowed and are destroyed, most of the time, the instant that somebody notices them.

11.8.3 Semi-evergreen vine thicket which may have emergent Acacia harpophylla, Casuarina cristata and Eucalyptus spp. Occurs on Cainozoic igneous rocks. Generally restricted to steeper, rocky hillsides.