Five Forks Mountain Community in Murphy North Carolina

Articles (Blog)

Buffalo Nuts

Posted on October 9, 2023 8:00 AM by Gerry Trout

I didn’t see any Virginia creeper that day showing fall color, but we did see this interesting thing.

My SEEK app told me that it is Buffalo Nut. Here’s what I found on Wikipedia, which is where SEEK got its information:

Pyrularia pubera is a shrub in the sandalwood family which grows through the eastern United States from New York to Alabama, being mostly found in the Appalachian mountains. It is commonly referred to as buffalo nut or oil nut. It grows up to 4m tall mostly in the shade of other trees. It is a parasitic plant, specifically a hemiparasite which while still photosynthetic, will also parasitize the roots of other plants around it. It can parasitize many hosts.