A clean sweep for the new year
By Ken Moore
Local storyteller Wayne Poole is passionate about brooms. I mean, he is really into showing and talking about old-timey brooms. I can listen for hours to the stories Wayne spins about wild nature and our local culture. A couple of weeks ago, I joined him on a local jaunt to find some materials to make brooms.
Now, Wayne is as opposite in disposition to me as one could imagine. I am fast-paced, easily distracted and boisterous, bordering on the obnoxious.
Wayne is quietly centered, easy-going and deliberate in his movements. We have worked very successfully together at Schoolhouse of Wonder, so I know that opposites can move to a single drummer from time to time.
So I had already determined that I was going to experience broom-making at Wayne’s speed. It was a truly memorable experience of slowing down to “smell the roses,†except the fragrances in this case were the subtle aromas of tawny-colored broomstraw.
Wayne began my introduction to sedge brooms by bringing out his collection of various-sized brooms, some a decade or two old. He explained that over the years of gathering broomstraw, or sedge, as some folks prefer, he noticed that “there’s more than one kind of broom out in those fields.†I acknowledged that, yes indeed, there are several different species, and he had a keen eye to detect their differences.
The one I believe is most commonly used for broom-making is old-field broomstraw, or broomsedge, Andropogon virginicus. We walked out into Wayne’s front yard and discovered he had two different species right there.
Wayne was disparaging of his front-yard broom because it wasn’t as tall as what was growing in an adjacent field. I guessed that he had mowed his yard midway during the summer, which he acknowledged, and that accounted for his native broom grass being shorter than the unmowed near-by field.
Broomstraw is a native grass, and native grasses generally grow actively during the warm months of the year. It is in sharp contrast to the popular lawn-turf exotic fescue, a cool-season grass, which prefers cooler growing conditions. Broomstraw begins to really express itself in the mid-summer and doesn’t become noticeable until it begins to shoot up in August and September and sports those delicate plume-like seeds in October and November. If mowed in late summer, it never quite catches up with its unmowed neighbor.
It is one of the pioneer native species to appear in an abandoned field and it can hold on for several years before other perennials and shrubs and trees begin to move in, the classic “old-field succession†of ecology texts.
Beginning in October and continuing well into the following springtime, broad sweeps of copper-reddish broomstraw across the native landscape are a beautiful sight to behold.
Next time you are out walking, pause from time to time to discover subtle differences and be appreciative of the old-timers who utilized those wild grasses to keep clean their hearths and yards.
I’m very proud of the broom I made under Wayne’s tutelage, and I have it proudly displayed next to my back door.
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