Glossary · Orchard
Mistletoe
Definition
A hemiparasitic plant, Viscum album, that grows on apple branches, drawing water and minerals from the host while photosynthesising for itself. Traditional orchards are its most important habitat in Britain.
- Subject
- Orchard
In more detail
Light infestation is tolerable and part of an orchard’s ecology; heavy infestation shades and weakens branches and eventually kills them, so old orchards are managed by removing a proportion of the growth rather than all of it. Because mistletoe on apple is culturally and commercially significant in the three counties, cutting is often timed for the Christmas market.
Mistletoe is dioecious — only female plants carry berries — and is spread by birds wiping seed onto bark.
Where this is covered properly
The glossary defines; these pages explain. Each is described in its own words.
Production
Mistletoe management
Controlling *Viscum album* on orchard apple trees, where it is at once a parasite that weakens limbs, a habitat of some interest, and in places a harvested winter crop.
Region
Herefordshire
The English county where cider was first treated as a subject for study rather than a farm by-product, and which now supplies more cider fruit than anywhere else in the United Kingdom.
Related terms
Terms that belong to the same part of the subject, or that this one is routinely confused with.
Orchard
Traditional orchard
An orchard of widely spaced standard or half-standard trees on vigorous rootstocks, with a permanent grassland floor that is grazed or mown. In the United Kingdom it is a recognised priority habitat.
Orchard
Veteran tree
An old tree carrying the features that come with age — hollowing trunk, decaying heartwood, dead limbs, loose bark and cavities — which together make it habitat for species that live nowhere else in the orchard.
Orchard
Orchard floor
The ground layer beneath the trees, and its management: permanent grazed grassland in traditional orchards, mown alleys with herbicide strips in intensive ones.
Where to go next
- Cider glossary — The whole vocabulary, by subject and A–Z.
- Comparisons — Terms that are only really clear when set against the thing they are not.
- Search — Finds terms by their aliases and by their spellings in other languages.
Sources
What this page rests on. Where a source is marked as registered rather than read, CiderHQ is recording that the body is authoritative on the subject without claiming to have worked through the document itself. See our evidence policy for what each state means.
Traditional Orchard Habitat Inventory and orchard loss surveys
People’s Trust for Endangered Species / Natural England · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24
Opened on 2026-08-24. The traditional orchard campaign pages were reached and confirmed, but the orchard-loss figures CiderHQ wants from this body sit in survey outputs rather than on the campaign page, and were not located in this pass.
Gloucestershire Orchard Trust · specialist organisation · retrieved 2026-08-24