Strange things end up on my desk…

And I love them all, truly I do. Even the parasitic ones that, left unchecked, would eventually take over our beloved Plains Garden. I am fascinated by all the weird extremes of natural selection- slime molds, corn smuts, flowers that smell like carrion and parasitic plants all find their way to me. My friends in horticulture know that in college I studied plants much like this particular weirdo- the parasitic plant dodder (Cuscuta sp.).

I’m sorry the picture doesn’t convey its incredibly insidious destructive nature… it’s curled around the stem of one of our favorite natives, a Rocky Mountain beeplant. The dodder started its life as
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