![]() Scotch broom ( Cytisus scoparius) is found along the east and west coasts of North America and in Idaho, Montana, and Utah. Fruit is a brownish-black pod with hairs only along the seams.Small leaves occur together in groups of three. ![]() If you enjoyed this post, please consider supporting my work.Scotch broom is a shrub with bright yellow flowers and stiff, slender branches. Unless otherwise stated, © Copyright Emma Doughty 2023. Perhaps your new broom will be better employed for the big post-Halloween clean-up, on All Saints Day. It’s far too scratchy to make a broom for flying on, but if you grow the hermaphrodite form you’ll be rewarded with ornamental scarlet berries, which give this diminutive shrub another name – Knee Holly.Īnd once you’ve made your broom, how do you make it fly? Well, it turns out that the ‘traditional’ way is to make yourself fly, by applying ‘flying ointments’ made from toxic plants to sensitive areas of skin. Not sure it will fly, though.īutchers used to use Butcher’s Broom ( Ruscus aculeatus) to scrub down their chopping boards and work surfaces. If you don’t have any broomcorn to hand, PFAF has a big list of other plants that can be used to make brooms.Ī Marram grass (Ammophila arenaria) broom from Norfolk. Mother Earth News even has an article on make your own broom once you’ve harvested your broom corn. It’s easy to grow, and should grow anywhere that sweetcorn grows (and available from Seeds of Italy in the UK. In the US it’s quite common to grow broom corn Sorghum bicolor for this purpose. Once you have your broom handle, you need something for the brush (unless you have birch twigs to hand). And you can eat the leaves while you’re waiting for it to grow. If it’s sturdy enough to use as a walking stick, it’s sturdy enough for a broom handle. If you wanted to fly a little more under the radar, so to speak, then you might consider growing the Walking Stick Kale. They don’t mention bamboo, but it has been grown commercially in the UK you might have trouble growing a cane stout enough to bear your weight, however. Other species mentioned on the allotment forestry site include hazel, sweet chestnut and elder, so you can choose your broom tree so that it fits in with your garden and the other uses you wish to make of it. The Guardian has a lovely article explaining how to make a besom. Apparently birch twigs are the best for the sweeping part of besoms as well. Birch, it says, makes excellent pea sticks, and there’s also the possibility of birch wine (but don’t drink and fly!). The allotment forestry website has lots of useful information about growing your own poles. There’s no reason why you couldn’t grow your own birch if you wanted to, and it’s suitable for coppicing, so you could have a new broomstick every few years. Magical brooms may well have been made from birch. I suspect most of them were used for more mundane purposes – they are jolly useful things to have to hand. In olden times it wouldn’t have been a problem to wander out into the woodland and cut a stout pole and then find sticks to make the sweeping end, and then you’d have yourself a fine broom, or besom. ![]() There can’t be a more iconic symbol of Halloween than a witch riding a broomstick.
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