A leafless, rootless parasitic vine with thin, yellow-orange twining stems that wrap around and draw nutrients from host plants.
Cuscuta australis (family Convolvulaceae), known in English as southern or Australian dodder, is an annual parasitic plant with smooth, dark brown, twining stems and tiny scale-like leaves. It has no true roots of its own and lives on other plants. Its small, pale yellow, five-parted flowers grow in compact clusters, and its round capsules hold three or four glossy brown seeds. To get the most seed, it times its flowering to match its host, by detecting a signalling protein from the host plant. It is very close to Cuscuta campestris.
It is found widely in Africa, Europe, temperate and tropical Asia, Australia and New Guinea. It was first described by Robert Brown in 1810 from a specimen collected in Queensland, Australia, in 1802. It parasitises many herbaceous and shrubby plants, often Polygonum, and prefers wet places along watercourses. Kew records it in East Africa on swamp vegetation such as Leersia grass, water lilies, papyrus and Polygonum at 900 to 1,200 metres. The Flora of West Tropical Africa (1931) recorded it under the name Cuscuta chinensis. In Indonesia it is used in traditional medicine as a tonic and sedative and for urinary complaints, and in Chinese medicine its seeds are used as a sedative and for diabetes, urinary complaints and impotence.
Sources: PROTA4U database (Plant Resources of Tropical Africa), which compiles records from Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Conservatoire et Jardin botaniques de Genève, FAO EcoCrop and other botanical databases; Wikipedia, "Cuscuta australis".
Species in the Cuscuta genus are used in parts of Asia as a traditional liver tonic, and extracts of this species have been studied for antioxidant and hepatoprotective properties.
A parasitic plant with no true roots or leaves; spreads by seed and by stem fragments that attach to a host plant via haustoria.