Love Vine (SPC Florida Plants )

Love Vine

Cassytha filiformis

Summary ²

Love vine is a leafless, climbing, twining, vine-like, autoparasitic plant that is frequently found in the sandhills, scrubs, and hammocks of the central and southern peninsula of Florida. It is a perennial, dextrorsely-twining (anti-clockwise) herb forming masses of stems up to 2 m long, filiform, striate, branched, glabrous to tomentose, green, orange or bright yellow. Leaves are alternate, reduced to minute scales,1 mm long, ovate to lanceolate, apex acute, and easiest seen near tips of stems. Flowers are greenish-white, borne in inflorescences, 1-2 cm long, or sometimes solitary. There are six tepals, each 0.1-2.0 mm long. Flowering spring-summer (May-July). The fruit is small, 7 mm in diameter, fleshy, and berry-like, bearing a single, spherical seed. The fruit emerges green, maturing black. Love vine parasitizes a wide variety of mainly woody hosts for physical support, nutrition, and water. It has specialized attachment and penetrating feeding structures known as haustoria that are found on the stems. The haustoria penetrate the host epidermis and extend into more interior tissues, extracting cellular nutrients and water from plant phloem and xylem. The pathogen does not create immediate, fatal damage to host cells and their metabolic processes, but rather, the host plants can die a long, protracted death by starvation and desiccation.

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Range Map

iNat Map

Leaf arrangement	Alternate
Flowers	White
Leaf shape	Lanceolate, Ovate
Fruit	Black, Green

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