Butcher’s Broom (Ruscus aculeatus)

Dear Readers, it’s always a pleasure to come across a wild, native plant that I hadn’t noticed before, and during a damp walk in my friend L’s patch of woodland last week, I discovered Butcher’s Broom, an indicator of ancient woodland. This is a most unusual plant in some ways – it’s a member of the Asparagus family, and just like that toothsome vegetable, what appear to be its ‘leaves’ are in fact extensions of the stem, called cladodes. Each leaf has a sharp, spikey point on the end of each ‘leaf’, and there are rather attractive bright red fruits. The flowers are tiny and yellowish-green, and grow out of the middle of the true leaves.

Butcher’s Broom flowers (Photo by By Benjamin Zwittnig – http://www2.arnes.si/~bzwitt/flora/ruscus_aculeatus.html, CC BY 2.5 si, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40879806)

All in all, this plant looks much more exotic than something you’d usually find in a patch of hornbeam and beech forest, but it just goes to show that we have some very interesting plants right under our noses. We also have to be a little bit careful about the wild provenance of any plants that we find, as the cultivar of the plant is becoming increasingly popular in gardens: the RHS has given the variety ‘John Redmond’ an Order of Merit. Butcher’s Broom is dioecious, meaning that individual plants are either male or female, and can also reproduce via rhizomes.

Butcher’s Broom ‘John Redmond’ – Photo by By Dominicus Johannes Bergsma – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38358922

Why ‘Butcher’s Broom’ though? The stiff, wiry stems were used for cleaning butcher’s blocks, and interestingly the plant has been found to contain a number of antioxidants. In Flora Britannica, Richard Mabey reports that butchers also used to build a kind of miniature hedge of Butcher’s Broom around meat in their shops to keep mice at bay. I’d have thought it would take more than a few twigs, but Butcher’s Broom also contains saponins, chemicals which have foam-forming qualities, and which are often used in soap, so perhaps that discourages the little rodents.

As it generally grows quite low, Butcher’s Broom also has the vernacular name ‘knee holly’. Mabey remarks on the plant’s habit of growing around the base of trees, as if to form a protective fence, and points out that sometimes the Butcher’s Broom is older than the tree itself.

Culpeper describes the plant thus in his Herbal:

‘a plant of Mars, being of a gallant cleansing and opening quality. The decoction of the root drank, and a poultice made of the berries and leaves applied, are effectual-in knitting and consolidating broken bones or parts out of joint. The common way of using it is to boil the root of it, and Parsley and Fennel and Smallage in white wine, and drink the decoction, adding the like quantity of Grassroot to them: The more of the root you boil the stronger will the decoction be; it works no ill effects, yet I hope you have wit enough to give the strongest decoction to the strongest bodies.’

Shame I didn’t have any handy when I broke my leg last year!

Butcher’s Broom (Photo by By Meneerke bloem – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=128179222)

Now, as you might expect from a plant with lots of saponins in it, Butcher’s Broom berries are poisonous. The shoots have been used as an asparagus alternative, and over on the EatWeeds website, Robin Harford has noted that in Tunisia the seeds are roasted and used as a coffee substitute. It seems like quite a lot of work to me!

On the Plant Lore website, it’s noted that street cleaners in the Azores still use brooms made from the plant. If only I’d known when I was there last year!

And here’s a poem. Nothing to do with the plant, but a little bit to do with a butcher, and his son. See what you think.

The Butcher’s Son

Mr Pierce the butcher
Got news his son was missing
About a month before
The closing of the war.
A bald man, tall and careful,
He stood in his shop and found
No bottom to his sadness,
Nowhere for it to stop.
When my aunt came through the door
Delivering the milk,
He spoke, with his quiet air
Of a considerate teacher,
But words weren’t up to it,
He turned back to the meat.
The message was in error.
Later that humid summer
At a local high school fete,
I saw, returned, the son
Still in his uniform.
Mr Pierce was not there
But was as if implied
In the son who looked like him
Except he had red hair.
For I recall him well
Encircled by his friends,
Beaming a life charged now
Doubly because restored,
And recall also how
Within his hearty smile
His lips contained his father’s
Like a light within the light
That he turned everywhere.

Thom Gunn