I photographed this showy mistletoe in the Bealey Valley in Arthurs Pass National Park. Always curious to find out about things new to me I looked it up and found that there are several species of mistletoe in New Zealand. Mistletoes are “stem hemi-parasites” which means they can produce their own food through photosynthesis, but they also use specially adapted roots called haustoria to extract water and nutrients from their host plant. This specimen is named Peraxilla tetrapetala and is also known as ‘red mistletoe’.One of its favourite hosts and the one I found it on is the NZ Mountain Beech (Nothofagus solandri var. cliffortioides). There’s some very good information about the New Zealand mistletoes here.