By CAFFYN JESSE
This is a letter to environmentalists about broom and gorse.
As the first yellow blossoms of broom and gorse begin to open, I recognize the devotion that brings those who love the land out to tackle the problem, with gloves and loppers, with herbicide bottles and burn permits.
I know the fierce love that wants to protect Garry oak meadows, fragile bluffs, rare lilies and camas and mosses that live nowhere else. I share it.
And I want to speak about what happens when we call broom and gorse “invasive species.” Plants are framed as enemies, and people gather to clear them with righteous intensity, as if resisting an occupation. The work can become grim.
Broom and gorse are early-successional species, answering the ecological realities created through logging, grazing, road-building, scraping, fire suppression. Broom partners with rhizobia to fix nitrogen, rebuilding fertility in depleted soils. Gorse stabilizes slopes, feeds pollinators, shelters birds. Both blaze with extravagant yellow, offering beauty and nectar to bees and butterflies when little else is in bloom.
In their homelands, these plants are medicine. Broom has been used — carefully — for the heart. Gorse has warmed ovens and fed animals once its spines were crushed. The yellow flowers yield dye. Broom stems weave into baskets, wattle fencing and garden borders. Both plants burn hot and clean as kindling. They can become charcoal, biochar, compost, craft, bouquet. Thorny gorse stems can be stacked and shaped into fences. These plants can be harvested, sung with, metabolized into local culture.
What if we ended the war and began the courtship?
Native plant communities need careful protection. Broom and gorse removal can be an act of profound care.
But we can cut without contempt. We can thin with gratitude. We can gather what we cut and use it. We can notice bees and bird nests before we lop a flowering branch. We can acknowledge that these plants are responding to human disturbance, not initiating it. We can refuse to displace our colonial histories onto their roots.
Environmentalism rooted in love — sensuous, participatory, creative — lasts. It invites people in. When restoration is fuelled by delight, it sustains us.
Imagine restoration days that end with woven fences, dyed cloth, kindling stacked for winter, bouquets gathered for spring weddings. Imagine teaching children how nitrogen-fixers prepare soil, in a world where broom and gorse are honoured as collaborators in transition landscapes — abundant partners whose energy we redirect rather than annihilate. Imagine how each autumn, as the pods dry and begin their bright percussion in the sun, we gather those abundant seed pods and turn them into instruments — rattles, shakers, small drums of stored sunlight. The very seeds that frustrate every effort at eradication could become a joyful music.
We could make gorse and broom so beloved and valued that they become rare.
The writer is a Salt Spring Island resident.
CAFFYN JESSE’s point of view sounds ‘lovely’ however, the letter did not take all aspects of these invasives into consideration. Broom does have nitrogen-fixing nodules on their roots, but the advantage is geared to their own survival. To imagine that the fibre from these plants could be used in basket weaving or whatever – see if you can find anyone that is willing to try it out. You will need about 50 people. Also, the fire hazard that these plants present is horrifying. A thick patch can produce flames 50 feet in the air. As a volunteer in Nanaimo, I successfully removed broom enough times (took 3 to 5 years) to have the patch eventually turn into Bracken fern. An edible plant for wildlife that completely dies off each fall.