Under the unkind umbrella of a spreading oak, a stunted horse chestnut tree had received a white feather. Dropped from a dove, it had landed on a big brown bud as sticky as a toffee The winter elements had then set to They started by soaking and battering the kiss-curl of into limpness. Then, they continued by it out in the bud’s protective goo and soiling it with dust, seeds and shards of leaves. This tree had caught not falling star but two. I spotted another white feather at waist height, glued fast to another terminal bud. In its wild , mistletoe is often overlooked. This is perhaps because the plant does not look like the product. The berried sprigs, tied off and hung up for sale in a Christmas market, seem to little relation to the untidy clusters of overlapping leathery leaves that form ragged globes in the trees, and can seem, in situ, as disfiguring burrs or knots of twigs.