The Evolutionist at Large by Grant Allen — Read

This afternoon, strolling through the under-cliff, I have come across two quaint and rather uncommon flowers among the straggling brushwood. One of them is growing like a creeper around the branches of this overblown gorse-bush. It is the lesser dodder, a pretty clustering mass of tiny pale pink convolvulus blossoms. The stem consists of a long red thread, twining round and round the gorse, and bursting out here and there into thick bundles of beautiful bell-shaped flowers. But where are the leaves? You may trace the red threads through their labyrinthine windings up and down the supporting gorse-branches all in vain: there is not a leaf to be seen. As a matter of fact, the dodder has none. It is one of the most thorough-going parasites in all nature.

Ordinary green-leaved plants live by making starches for themselves out of the carbonic acid in the air, under the influence of sunlight; but the dodder simply fastens itself on to another plant, sends down rootlets or suckers into its veins, and drinks up sap stored with ready-made starches or other foodstuffs, originally destined by its host for the supply of its own growing leaves, branches, and blossoms. It lives upon the gorse just as parasitically as the little green aphides live upon our rose-bushes. The material which it uses up in pushing forth its long thread-like stem and clustered bells is so much dead loss to the unfortunate plant on which it has fixed itself.