Bewitching

It's the week of Halloween and I thought I'd tell you something about witches...witch's brooms, that is. I took my first class in horticulture at Ohio State in the spring of 2005 and it was a bit of a learning curve - a determined journey to learn about plants. Tackling the identification of some 200 plants, their common and botanical name was pretty overwhelming. I knew some plants, but not their botanical name. Luckily, I had some folks mentoring my beginning efforts in learning these plants and eventually it became less intimidating.

In December of 2006 I discovered a mass in a pine on campus. It was located near the ROTC building and next to the OSU ice rink.. I got closer for a look and it seemed to be a tight wad of pine branches with miniature cones - sort of like a Mugo Pine growing out of a limb some 12' up in the air. What's is this?

I learned it was a witch's broom - a strange thing that occurs on woody plants where a disease or deformity occurs and limbs shoot out of a point on a branch. This bundle of twigs supposedly looks like a witch's broom, but it still looks like a Mugo pine on steroids to me. Cuttings can be taken from the "clump" and grafted onto rootstock to sometimes grow an unusual, even appealing tree. This is how new cultivars are sometimes discovered. An example would be, Picea orientalis 'Tom Thumb Gold'. I made some cuttings for my professor and he attempted to make this work. A noisy squirrel had chosen the branch clump as his habitat and he fussed at me for messing with this. I don't believe the grafting took on the rootstock. However...

Recently I was driving westbound on Ackerman Road near the Red Roof Inn and saw something out of the corner of my eye. I did a double take to the pine where a mass of branches thickened in an area. I turned at the next street into the OSU student family housing complex to find the tree. I thought, it's got to be a witch's broom.

I wonder if there is some golden opportunity here?


OK, you hort people....graft this!

Several days later I went in search of witches broom plants in the OSU Chadwick Arboretum where I volunteer. Adri had tipped me off to brooms in the Conifer Garden along Lane Avenue. She gave me the accession number and plant name so I went on a hunt. I needed to document more plants and dedicated benches and trees in that area anyway.

The Picea pungens 'St. Mary's Broom' is quite the small thing next to the collection of blue spruces with the OSU Schotteinstein Center backdrop.
And the Picea orientalis 'Shadow's Broom' - Oriental Spruce is also quite a small thing. These are new plantings and need protection (hence the cages) from critters that might nibble the needles. These small witch broom conifers grow slowly and stay small.

The Pinus densiflora 'Rata' broom is a lovely little plant that actually looks like a broom. It is a Rata Japanese Red Pine witches broom.

I wonder if it bewitched from one of my favorite pines in the arboretum, the Japanese Red Pine, Pinus densiflora. This one is located near the Agriculture Engineering building. It shimmers on the landscape and gets lovelier with age.

There's another one of these in the Conifer Gardens with the Arena as a backdrop.