Witches broom in pine trees12/7/2023 The number of witch’s brooms he’s discovered and mapped is at 700 and counting. Even earthbound, Horky is still in the thick of broom hunting. It was his first day in the field since he was paralyzed a year ago, when he fell 25 feet trying to retrieve a broom from a tamarack tree.īut that hasn’t sapped his enthusiasm for witch’s brooms. “Some of these brooms are very expensive by the time we take all the money for gas, hotel rooms, and all this kind of stuff in to them.”īrooms hunters often donate some of their haul to the American Conifer Society, where Gee said gardeners and other plant aficionados will bid up to $500 at the organization’s annual auction for particularly unusual shrubs.ĭuluth botanist Josh Horkey joined the collecting expedition in his wheelchair. “We’ll never get rich at doing it, that’s for sure,” he said. But Gee said they do it for fun, and for the camaraderie. ![]() Many of the men own nurseries, and may eventually sell some plants created from these brooms. “You may grow something for five to seven years, and find out it ends up in the burn pile.” “It’s a very small percentage of the brooms that ever turn out to be really something,” Gee said. The process requires skill, patience, and some luck, said Gary Gee, a nursery owner from Stockbridge, Mich. The next morning, in Braeu’s heated garage, the men gather to divvy up the 23 brooms they harvested.Įach collector will take home a few pieces of each specimen, to try to grow into new plants. He and other collectors are driven by this sense of discovery, of finding something no one else has seen before. So that’s an awesome thing, one of a kind!”īraeu traces his interest in horticulture back to his youth in Germany. ![]() “So when they first come out, they’ll probably have a little pink color to them, so it would be almost like a Christmas ornament on a tree. Braeu, owner of Edelweiss Nursery outside Duluth, has high hopes for this broom. Joe Braeu, who organized the weekend broom hunting expedition, quickly dubs this broom “Conehead,” because of the profusion of pine cones.Ĭollectors assign each broom its own name, so no one else can come along, propagate it, and claim it as theirs. This time, rather than climbing, one of the “hunters” shoots the broom high out of a pine tree with a shotgun, and the others rush to pick up the pieces that fall to the ground. They were dubbed “witches brooms” in Medieval Europe because it was believed witches placed them high in trees, and even rested in them.įarther up the road and deeper into the northern Minnesota woods, the group spots a couple more brooms high in trees. Each is the only one of its kind in the world. They look like balls of twigs woven together, and can grow to several feet across. The term, which dates to the Middle Ages, refers to tree mutations made up of dense masses of shoots growing from a single point. Hermsen and Larson are part of a tiny group of plant fanatics – they estimate they number about 200 nationwide – who traipse through forests collecting witch’s brooms. In two or three decades it might only be knee-high. It will likely only grow to one-tenth or one-twentieth the size of its parent tree. Hermsen hopes that by grafting a piece of the broom to an already established stem and roots, he can produce a unique species of dwarf conifer. ![]() The dense broom only grows about the length of his fingernail every year. “You don’t have to be crazy to do this,” Hermsen said, “but it does help!”Īfter inspecting the broom’s tiny needles, he explained that they’re so crowded together that the twigs look like short braids of evergreen. Larson, a nursery manager from Newark, Ohio, is one of nine men who came to northern Minnesota from across the Midwest and as far away as Europe to hunt witch’s brooms in mid-January.Īfter managing to reach the broom and cut it from its branch, he tossed it to the ground, where Dennis Hermsen, a nursery owner from Farley, Iowa, grabbed it. “Hey I’m moving around pretty good up here!” he exclaims as the tree swayed back and forth in the wind. ![]() DULUTH – On a frigid January morning, Rich Larson scales a big tamarack tree, breaking off branches as he climbs towards his target.Ībout 30 feet high, as the wind swirls around him, Larson, 59, spots what he’s looking for: a small, tightly woven mass of branches called a “witches broom” - the genetic source of many landscape plants and shrubs sold at nurseries.
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