Obviously, pretty old in 1980, it took a good few years of trying pieces before I managed to get a graft to take. My favorite was a huge broom over a metre across in a Scots pine by the side of a major ‘A’ road near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, England.

Although they can occur in any plant, they are most often associated with conifers. These are likely to be stable and when propagated can make attractive dwarf or colorful new cultivars of horticultural value. There are many other examples, but we are more concerned in this article with the brooms caused by a genuine genetic mutation in a growing tip, not necessarily the leading shoot. A dwarf mistletoe, Arceuthobium douglasii induces massive hanging conglomerations of branches on Douglas firs ( Pseudotsuga menziesii) in California and Oregon. lasiocarpa (white and subalpine firs) in the Rockies. The fungus Taphrina betulina is responsible for witches' brooms on downy and silver birch, and the fir broom rust Melampsorella caryophyllacearum stimulates bud formation to produce large numbers of disfiguring deciduous brooms on Abies concolor and A. Interference in this mechanism by mutations or cytokinins (a phytohormone) induced by fungi, insects, nematodes, phytoplasmas, viruses or other outside agencies can cause plant apices to develop into witches' brooms. Normally in plants, especially evident in trees, the leading shoot will produce an auxin, a plant hormone, which will slow the growth of the secondary and tertiary shoots to prevent them from overgrowing it. They are the source of some of our most choice and beautiful dwarf conifers. Additions to the International Conifer RegisterĪ discussion of the various spellings of witches' broom (witch's broom, witch’es-broom, etc.) is for another article but a learned explanation can be found in the British Conifer Society Journal, Autumn 2015.Ī witch’s broom may be a broom used by a witch in folklore (a Besom) but in its horticultural sense it is more familiar as a diseased or mutated mass of dense deformed twigs and foliage forming a birds nest-like structure in a tree or shrub.

Witch on a broomstick