Pretty cool Sam. I picture you running around campus and driving around Northern Oregon, bumping into things and hearing the hum of lane dividers on roads as your glance is stolen by tree after tree searching for broom. What a great start to your life, a job in a hobby you love and school where you can get a solid foundation to work with and discover brooms between classes. Life is good! -Will

Thank you guys for your nice comments! Jon, I also like the 'Sweet Gumball' most of all. It's the most tight one of all and I remember well that the scion for grafting was very small, only 1 inch long! It has a very good potential for using in small gardens and it will even look very good in a rock garden as well. The 'Mighty Mushroom' has a very bright blue colour indeed. I can see now that it's shape will become like the original witches' broom which was huge with a very nice shape! The variegated pine in the background is a Pinus peuce 'Aureovariegata'. Jay, don't worry about plants comming back home someday. The same ones were also grafted in the U.S. but I don't know what their grafting results are at this moment. I know you've to be crazy to go to the UP in winter time. But remember, at the end we collected a nice amound of brooms of several species which will have a great value for us witches' broom hunters. All together it was worth the cold and effort to collect scions of them, and ofcoarse the fun we had together which was the most enjoyable thing if I'm looking back to these expeditions... If you're sitting at home on your bud you will never find a nice witches' broom for sure :0) Al, you're right, the hard work payed off into a nice variety of Tamarack witches' brooms which will be availlable for collectors very soon. The whole proces was fun: First you've to spot the brooms, then the scion collecting begins which is most of the time far from easy. The grafting results are very various from eachother, this is differend per broom. It's also very possible that the growing habit of a grafted broom is much differend from the original one, that's why research is very important! The good ones will be selected for a furthur propagation which will be most of the time much easier then from scions of the original broom. This is because they're growing in much better circumstances so scions are thicker and full of energy. Alex, I remember one of my U.S. fellow broomhunter friends says to a reporter of a radio station": "you don't have to be crazy to do this kind of thing, but it will help for sure" :0) The brotherhood of witches' broom hunters are all people with the same interest, from which there are only a few dozen in the world. Maybe the witches' brooms were hanging there in the trees as toys waiting for us to find them :0) The ones planted in my Pinetum will be observed for 2 years. This year they will be observed without any pruning, next winter they all will get pruned heavy like a pollard-willow to see how they will develop into a nursery way of growing which are nice plants with a good saleable shape. I think all will be released, but I want to find out which broom is suitable for which garden which are divide in categories; big garden, small garden and rock garden. The ones you mentioned are having allready a nice shape without pruning them. So far the 'Manestique' is weird with it's two different types of new foliage which will be very interesting how it will develop in future time... Dave, the ones shown here are not from last January. Like you observed well, I've a very good growth on them which is the result of a combination of several nurseriemen tricks ;0). Prior to our work only the 'Hartwick Pines' and the 'Arethusa Bog' were availlable in a commercial way in Europe. This is because the Horstmann Nursery introduced them here in the 80ties but now they're faded away and are rarely seen in collections nowadays... Also in the U.S. true broom forms of this species are rarely seen at nurseries. This is because of a lack of interest but also the grafting result isn't that hight if you don't do it in the right way. The 'KBN W.B.' from Greg Williams is also a rare one among collectors. That you have it in your collection will not say that its easy to find, this is because the main sources are gone. The same counts for the other broom forms which are mentions in the RHS books, you see them rarely in collections nowadays... On the other hand there are several Larix laricina witches' brooms seedlings selected by the late Sidney Waxman. He selected several good ones like: -'Beehive' -'Blue Sparkler' -‘Deborah Waxman’ -'Nana' seedlings only numbered. -'Newport Beauty' These are much more common in the trade and more easilly available because as witches' broom seedlings they're way easier to propagate then true witches'brooms which were collected in the wild at first. Thanks for your complimnet for the nice work! Josan, you're right about the seedlings from Sidney waxman, like said before they're more common in the trade because of much better propagation results. I visited Joe Stupka last winter, but he didn't mention something about a Larix laricina broom. Do you know the names of the ones he found? You mentioned that you found many Larix laricina brooms when you lived in Minnesota. Finding them is one thing, to collect scions of them is another ;0) My buddy Erik spotted over a 100 brooms of Larix x marschlinsii (L. decidua x L. kaempferi), but most of them are hanging way too hight to reach them by ladder and pole pruners, but several nice ones were collected last winter and are succesful progated as well. Next year I'll show a topic of this result. I wish you good luck in grafting the brooms of the southern pines and hope you'll show us your results as well later on here at this forum. This post was edited by coniferjoy on Sun, Aug 11, 13 at 16:45

The next thing to consider is how high up into the tree that broom may be. If it's more than head-high up into the branches, I really don't see an office manager cutting scions for us. Plus, would a non-expert really know what they're cutting? This looks like a job for a conehead, and I'm still contemplating doing the job. @Shastensis, how high off the ground is that broom? ~Dave

Hello, i can see that this post is going to die like some brooms, so i want to change this;) Dou you remebner Pinus sylvestris Kasia?? In last year i put photo with 1-year graft now i want to show you how this cultivar was growing in second year and how she is growing in third year. 2 year graft [IMG]http://i928.photobucket.com/albums/ad122/wiqtor17/Witches%20broom/PinussylvestrisKasia-2rokpoposadzeniu.jpg[/IMG] 3 year graft (2 pictures) [IMG]http://i928.photobucket.com/albums/ad122/wiqtor17/Witches%20broom/PinussylvestrisKasia-3rok2.jpg[/IMG] [IMG]http://i928.photobucket.com/albums/ad122/wiqtor17/Witches%20broom/PinussylvestrisKasia-3rok.jpg[/IMG] All the best, Wiktor