Martin Fone's Blog, page 96

The Mysterious Affair At Styles

A review of The Mysterious Affair at Styles – 221231

Challenged, apparently, by her sister to write a detective novel, Agatha Christie came up with this impressive debut, which marks the first appearance of one her remarkable amateur sleuth, Hercule Poirot, although he is a more subdued, less mannered character than his later incarnations. It is also great fun and while there are signs of immaturity, particularly in a tendency to be just a tad too clever, it stands as an ageless monument to Christie’s burgeoning talent.

It was written in 1916 but not published in the States until October 1920 and in the UK until January 1921, as Christie had received several rejections and her manuscript was only accepted by Bodley Head when she agreed to alter the penultimate chapter, the set piece reveal by Poirot, from the original setting of a courtroom to the library of the Styles library. Her experience of traditional publishers gives hope to aspiring writers.

Christie drew on a couple of aspects of her wartime experience as she put pen to paper in Dartmoor. She had worked in a dispensary at a hospital where she gained a working knowledge of drugs and poisons and had seen at first hand wounded Belgian soldiers and refugees from the German occupation of their country who had taken up temporary shelter in nearby Torquay. Poirot is one such refugee, staying with several of his compatriots in a house put at their disposal by the local do-gooder and busy-body, Emily Cavendish. Although Poirot, who had had a distinguished police career, had come down in the world, he still is careful with his appearance and his mannerisms cause some amusement amongst the locals.

Emily Cavendish lives in a country house, The Styles, with her extended and impecunious family, which includes her stepson, John Cavendish and his wife, Mary, her other stepson, Lawrence, her ward, Cynthia, and her companion, Evie Howard. A sizeable cat has been put amongst the pigeons by Emily’s recent marriage to a much younger man, Alfred Inglethorp. The rest of the family suspect the extravagantly bearded parvenu to be a gold digger, whose arrival means that he will inherit Emily’s fortune were she to die. Feelings are running high, several mutter their wish that Inglethorp was dead.

It is into this maelstrom of emotions that our narrator, Arthur Hawkins, steps, having been invited to spend some of his convalescence at Styles by John Cavendish. Emily is murdered by poisoning. That afternoon she had been arguing, with either Alfred or John, and had made a new will, although it could not be found. As Emily had eaten little at dinner and had retired early, it was unclear how the poison was administered to her. Her document case had been forced open.

Hawkins, who bumps into Poirot in the village and, naturally, not only knows of him but is in awe of his reputation as a crack detective, persuades John Cavendish to enlist the Belgian’s help. Christie has fun putting the spotlight of suspicion on several of the characters and Hawkins finds himself in an uncomfortable spot when John is arrested and stands trial and when the sainted Mary is revealed to have had a dalliance with the poison expert, Dr Bauerstein. He even proposes to Cynthia who momentarily also falls under the spotlight.

A chance remark made by Hawkins unearths a clue that enables Poirot to unravel the complicated plot to kill Emily in what became the trademark grand reveal with all suspects assembled in one room. The cleverness of the plot depends upon knowledge of certain chemical reactions and a willingness to gamble on the concept in English law of double jeopardy.

It is an enjoyable romp and while the plot occasionally creaks at the seams, Christie enjoys contrasting Poirot’s methodical approach with Inspector Japp’s misguided impetuosity. Of course, the Belgian’s little grey cells make sense of it all in the end.   

Mystery In White

A review of Mystery in White by J Jefferson Farjeon – 221230

Christmas is traditionally a time for murders and stories of the paranormal. Joseph Farjeon, an author I had not come across before, cleverly combines these two elements in the intriguing but ultimately disappointing Mystery in White, originally published in 1937. Not content with that he also conjoins two very familiar detective fiction tropes, a train stranded in the snow and a country house with an overpowering sense of evil.

The book begins promisingly enough. A railway carriage offers the writer the opportunity to put together disparate characters who would not ordinarily mix with each other. Here we have an eminent member of the Royal Psychical Society, Mr Maltby, who is on his way to conduct a conversation with Charles I, brother and sister, David and Lydia Carrington, a chorus girl, Jessie, on her way to an audition, a bumptious businessman, and a troubled clerk by the name of Thompson. It is snowing heavily, and the train has come to a halt and shows little sign of moving on.

After some time, the occupants of the carriage decide that their only option is to leave the train and make their way to the nearest station by foot. Needless to say, they get lost, Jessie injures her foot, Thompson catches pneumonia but they do stumble across a house in the remote countryside that is lit up and warm, well provided with food and prepared to receive guests, but there is no one around. To add to the mystery, the teapot has boiled dry and there is a kitchen knife on the floor. The party decide to avail themselves of the house’s hospitality, assuaging their conscience over this impromptu piece of housebreaking by meticulously detailing each item they have consumed, and valuing it with the intention of settling up when they eventually leave.

The house has a distinct air of mystery about it, with a large portrait of a previous owner dominating the room. Maltby’s psychic juices begin to flow and Jessie, who keeps a diary, is particularly sensitive to the vibes of the place. There is an additional mystery visitor who calls himself Smith and initially denies having been on the train. He adds to the air of menace by escaping from and breaking into the house, and, clearly, he has been to the house before the rest of the party. Concerns about Smith mount when it emerges that there had been a murder in the adjacent carriage of the train.

There are further unsettling events. David Carrington follows some tracks and comes across a blooded hammer lying in the snow and a suspicious body-shaped mound, Jessie grows increasingly uneasy in the stranger’s bed, and Maltby, now attuned to the vibes of the place, begins to realise that the key to unlocking the house’s mystery lies in the portrait. David comes across a car with an elderly man and a younger woman who were on their way to the house, and they shed some light on its mysteries. However, the resolution, in part, comes in the form of a paranormal experience orchestrated by the industrious Dr Maltby.

In truth, the ending is a little disappointing, especially for a plot that held great promise. The characters, each in their own way strongly drawn and vivid, barely interrelated with each other, despite Farjeon’s lame attempts to inject some romantic intrigue, and the connection between the murder on the train and the house’s secret were tenuous at best. The messiness of the ending was compounded by the belated arrival of the police who only grasped part of the solution. It read as though Farjeon himself had lost interest in the possibilities his clever initial plotting had created.

Nonetheless, he writes well, with no little humour and sustains the reader’s interest. It is well worth a read if only to mourn an opportunity lost.

More Witches’ Broom

Genetic mutations in the buds of the branches can also cause a broom to form, although, normally, there will only be one to a tree. Unlike those caused by living organisms, these can be harmful, diverting energy from the rest of the tree and reducing its strength and ability to withstand extreme weather and disease.  

Even more deadly is Witches’ broom disease, endemic to South America and the Caribbean, and first reported in 1785 by the explorer, Alexandre Rodrigues, in the Brazilian Amazon basin. When it spread from the Amazon basin to the state of Bahia in 1989, Brazil was the world’s second grower of cocoa beans, producing around 400,000 metric tonnes of beans a year. By 2000, its harvest had fallen by three-quarters, wiping out many cocoa farms, causing economic hardship and environmental disaster as dispossessed farmers cut down rainforests to make room for livestock and arable crops.  

The cause of this deadly outbreak was a fungus, Moniliophthora perniciosa, which stimulated the plant to produce cytokinin, causing the pods to wither and die and diverting its dwindling energy to sprout bundles of stunted twigs. It also attacked the roots which meant that the traditional method of removing infected branches was less effective, a discovery at the turn of this century that has allowed scientists to develop more effective strategies to deal with the disease.

Pieces of Witches’ brooms that have developed from a genetic mutation have been rooted or grafted to produce dwarf or miniature plants. Many miniatures, especially conifers, which are commonly found in gardens almost certainly started from a broom, a practice which began almost 250 years ago.

The earliest named miniature conifer was the bee-hive shaped Picea abies “Clanbrassiliana”, a dwarf form of Norway spruce, first found around 1780 on the Moira Estate near Belfast. Lord Clanbrassil transferred to his country residence in Tollymore, Co Down, where the mother plant flourishes to this day. The Lodigges Nursery of Hackney introduced the species to the nursery trade in the 1820s.

Another early conifer cultivar was Picea abies “Pygmaea”, which began appearing in arboretums and exotic gardens from around 1800. Two were grown in what was reputedly the world’s first rock garden at Lamport Hall in Northamptonshire from 1820, but sadly they have now been removed.

In the Heather Garden at Savill in Windsor Great Park there is a splendid specimen of Pinus sylvestris “Beuvronensis”, a dwarf Scotch pine, that now stands over 17-feet high. Its height suggests that dwarf or slow conifer cultivars derived from Witches’ brooms grow faster over time as the hormones suppressing growth of the leading shoot become less effective.

Intriguingly, the Little Gem spruce (Picea abies “Little Gem”) came from a Witches’ broom taken from a Bird’s Nest spruce (Picea abies “Nidiformis”), which had earlier been cultivated from a Witches’ broom produced by a Norway spruce.  

The usual way to get hold of a Witches’ broom is to climb the tree and carefully cut it down. However, Chinquapin, the Newsletter of the Appalachian Botanical Society[1] (Winter 2012), revealed that in the States “most often a shotgun is used”, a procedure that leads to a shower of broken pieces raining to the ground. As no roots will have survived the shock, small portions of the broom, scions, are grafted on to rootstock of the same variety.

Witches’ brooms have also been used to make brooms, the most recherché of research published in the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine (May 2007)[2] revealed. Of the 108 plants traditionally used to make brooms in Bulgaria, Italy, Macedonia, and Romania, it reported, two were taxa fungi that produce “the so-called Witches’ broom”, a curious circularity.  

There is more to Witches’ broom than meets the eye.   

[1]

[2] https://ethnobiomed.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1746-4269-3-20

Lost Word Of The Day (8)

Well, I have returned from my holiday and have desarcinated my cases, a verb used for a century from the mid-17th century to mean to unload or unburden.

Lost Word Of The Day (7)

An early 17th century noun used to describe the croaking or cawing of birds was crocitation. Time for a revival, me thinks.

The Catherine Wheel

A review of The Catherine Wheel by Patricia Wentworth – 221224

From a plotting perspective The Catherine Wheel, the fifteenth in Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver series and originally published in 1949, is a bit of a mess. It starts off with a with a whiff of smuggling, then side tracks into a suspected crime passionnel before returning to the world of the smuggler. It reads as though Wentworth had a bit of an internal conflict over which way the book should go.

The story starts promisingly enough. The rich eccentric Jacob Taverner puts an intriguing advertisement in the papers seeking members of his disparate family – there has been a long-standing family split – and with the lure of £100 each invites them to spend a weekend at The Catherine Wheel, a pub that has been in the family for generations. By this means Wentworth has produced the old Golden Age Detective fiction trope of a bunch of disparate characters spending a weekend together. What could possibly go wrong?

Meanwhile, the Catherine Wheel has been on Scotland Yard’s radar screen as a potential hub for the smuggling of drugs and jewellery back and forth the Channel. Sergeant Abbott is sent down to investigate along with Miss Silver, whose role is to observe the goings-on at the pub at close quarters.

Among the invited guests are Jane Heron and Jeremy Taverner, who are in love, but Jane is reluctant to marry as they are cousins. Jane has met Miss Silver before, and it is through her good offices that Miss Silver is given the opportunity to stay at the Catherine Wheel and observe the guests at close quarters. A visit to the nearby Challoner’s home, where Abbott is staying, allows Jeremy to reveal a secret which puts his and Jane’s love affair back on track.

The other love interest is between Eily, a maid at the pub, and John Higgins, another of the selected cousins but one who steadfastly refuses to enter the premises. He makes his presence known to Eily by whistling the air of a well-known hymn. However, his are not the only eyes on Eily. She has caught the attention of Luke White, another cousin, albeit one “born on the wrong side of the blanket”, who works at the pub as a waiter.

Inevitably, there is a murder, Luke White found stabbed in the back in the hallway. Eily is the one to find him, although yet another cousin, Florence Duke, is close by covered in blood. Higgins’ tell-tale whistling was heard around the time of the murder. Inspector Crisp from the local police believes it to be an open and shut case, a murder committed by Higgins who took exception to White’s overtures. Miss Silver begs to differ.

The reader by this point is slightly bemused because the complexities of a smuggling plot and Jacob Taverner’s attempts through questioning his guests to find a secret passage to the beach seem to have been long forgotten. However, they come back with a vengeance as Miss Silver aided and abetted by her acolyte Sergeant Abbott slowly piece together the truth behind the murder and the bigger picture that it reveals. Most of the real culprits are easy to spot, but the tension ramps up as Eily is kidnapped and the long arms of the law and the knitting needles of an amateur sleuth are closing in.

Wentworth’s storytelling saves this messy plot from collapsing in on itself and makes for an entertaining if overlong read. Her characters are nicely drawn and there is no little wit and sharp observation. One of the charming aspects of the book is her note to her readers at the beginning that Miss Silver’s cough is an affectation rather than a sign of illness. It must warm the cockles of an author’s heart when a character she has created jumps off the page in the minds of her readers.

Miss Silver lives to fight many more battles.

Charity Shops

At some point 88% of us have bought something from a charity shop, according to the Charity Retail Association (CRA). In 2020 we spent £746 million in them[1], with the average spend per transaction reaching £6.53 in the summer of 2022. There are around 10,200, occupying 3.26% of the UK’s retail units, staffed by some 26,800 full time employees and over 186,000 volunteers[2]. The high street in Frimley, where I live, has four of them, two, curiously, supporting the same institution.

Known as thrift shops in the States and oppies, short for opportunity shops, in Australia and New Zealand, charity shops seem to be more prevalent in Anglophone countries. Elsewhere, the sale of what the CRA call their “unique range of goods” is transacted in the open, for example at the French brocante (flea market), vide-grenier (a car boot sale), or municipal braderie (a festival combining a flea market)[3].

British charity shops have fought hard to dispel the image of being an “instructive inventory of the passé”, as Mary McCarthy described one in The Group (1954), a repository of outmoded trends and fashions infused with the faint aroma of mothballs. Nevertheless, over 90% of their turnover still comes from the sale of goods donated by well-wishers, who, if British Income Tax payers, can boost the retail value of their donations by a further 25% through the Government’s Gift Aid Scheme. Saving around 339,000 tonnes of textiles from disposal, they not only help a good cause but also make a small but valuable contribution to securing the planet’s future.

While shelves and racks still contain single-purpose kitchen appliances, clothing bought on a whim, and ornaments last seen on a grandparent’s dresser, a developing trend is to sell “bought-in goods”, discontinued lines from major retailers. All new and sold at discounted prices, in summer 2022 they made up around 7.3% of their total turnover.

Concerted efforts to ameliorate the conditions of the poor began in earnest in the 18th century. A “poor rate” levied on parish householders, as well as establishing workhouses, helped those able to work but whose wages were too low to support their families by giving them “relief in aid of wages” in the form of money, food, and clothing. Funds were also collected at balls, concerts, and charitable art exhibitions, wealthy philanthropists bequeathed substantial sums to charitable purposes, and single purpose charities such as The Foundling Hospital (1739) and the Marine Society (1756) were established to give unfortunate children a better start in life.

By the 19th century the charity bazaar or “fancy fair” became a popular way to raise funds, receiving royal imprimatur in 1833 when Queen Adelaide, William IV’s wife, attended the “Grand Fancy Fair and Bazaar” in London. Soon London was hosting more than a thousand charity functions a year and the idea spread throughout the country.

Bazaars were often grand affairs, offering entertainment in the form of puppet shows, fortune telling, plays and music, as well as selling a wide range of goods. They were often themed, with elaborate décor, actors dressed in costumes, and refreshments suitable for the occasion. Offering a rare opportunity for the sexes to mingle freely, patrons would dress in their Sunday best.

They were not universally popular. Religious leaders criticised the materialism and false piety charity bazaars encouraged, while the Cornhill Magazine complained in 1861 that women manning the stalls used feminine “coaxing” and “insinuating” to persuade the public to part with their money.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/319953/charity-shops-sales-revenue-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/

[2] https://www.charityretail.org.uk/key-statistics/

[3] https://www.fleamarketinsiders.com/what-is-brocante-vide-grenier-braderie/

The Case Of The Murdered Major

A review of the Case of the Murdered Major by Christopher Bush – 221221

Wow, this is a completely different Ludovic Travers story. It is as though Christopher Bush has pushed the factory reset button and decided to reconfigure his amateur sleuth, Ludovic Travers, afresh. Gone is the urbane man about town, a man whose finely tuned grey cells and well-honed deductive powers solve many a knotty murder mystery to the exasperation of Scotland Yard’s very own “General”, George Wharton. Travers is a much more subdued figure, trapped in an unusual set of circumstances where he is almost powerless to solve a crime and reliant upon the good offices of the “General” to put an intriguing mystery to bed.

There’s a war on, don’t you know? The Case of the Murdered Major, the first of a trilogy and originally published in 1941, now reissued by Dean Street Press, sees series sleuth Anthony Travers set on his twenty-third adventure having enlisted into the army. He is posted as adjutant with the rank of Captain to No 54 Prisoner of War camp in Stoneleigh under the command of the bumptious and irascible Major Stirrop. Stirrop has the uncanny talent to rub his underlings up the wrong way primarily by insisting he is always right.

The first detachment of Germans prisoners arrives, one of whom is a British agent. There is a conundrum when on one of the frequent counts of prisoners, it is discovered that there is an extra one but when the count is repeated, the additional prisoner just as mysteriously has disappeared. Resentment of Stirrop’s rather laid back but authoritarian approach seethes in the background and it is no surprise when his body is found in the snow. There are no footprints in the snow but two large depressions, one where the body was found and the other nearby, suggesting, perhaps, that the body was moved. His hat has some traces of sand on it and some way from his body. His skull has been fractured.

Naturally, movement into and out of the camp is strictly controlled and the assumption is that someone inside must have murdered the Major. It is a mystery that is a sort of impossible crime where the culprit, while possibly a German agent, is likely to have been under Stirrop’s command. But who? And why were his secretary and Stirrop’s love rival seen lurking outside the camp at the time of the murder and did the British agent, Lading, really leave the camp in the car? What, if anything, has the extra prisoner who appears and disappears have to do with it all?

Fortunately, of all the officers that the police could throw at the problem, George Wharton comes to the rescue and takes charge of the investigation in his usual inimitable style. It helps that he has a working relationship with Travers but the latter’s role is reduced to more of a bit part, making sure things happen as he takes temporary charge of the camp. For experienced readers of Golden Age detective fiction, the culprit is relatively easy to spot but the method used to kill the Major is one of Bush’s more ingenious.

As well as toning down the role of Travers in this story, Bush also takes the (hitherto) unusual step of having the story narrated, albeit in the third person, by an all-knowing anonymous person. Reading the book is rather like sitting in front of a roaring fire and listening to a lengthy but ultimately thrilling yarn. In writing the book Bush clearly draws from his own experience in running a POW camp and while there is some purely military procedure which might have chimed with his contemporary readers, he builds up a picture of tedium and pettiness. In some ways the murder brings the place alive, and the arrival of Wharton brings not only more of a civilian perspective to the second half of the book but also an increase in pace. The denouement reads like a wartime thriller.

Once I had got over the shock of Bush’s about turn on the characterisation of Travers, I settled down to enjoy a well-written, well-plotted mystery. I look forward to reading the second part of the trilogy to see how the newly promoted Major Travers fares.

Groaning Spinney

A review of Groaning Spinney by Gladys Mitchell – 221218

Also going by the title of Murder in the Snow, which the latest reprint uses, Groaning Spinney is the twenty-third in Mitchell’s Mrs Bradley series and was originally published in 1950. By her standards this is a conventional, relatively straightforward murder mystery which progresses in a linear and logical fashion. She resists the temptation to distort the conventions of the genre to near breaking point and to bury her reader in an avalanche of arcana.

Indeed, there is barely any detection, very few surprises and an obvious set of suspects, where the motivation is more the mystery than the whodunit. It is as if Mitchell has put her experimenting to one side and has concentrated on producing a “normal” novel, toning down the complexity of her plot in favour of developing a set of interesting characters and imagining how they would react to the situations they find themselves in.

Nonetheless, there is still a dark undertone to the book with a high body count, five humans in all and two dogs and two cats. The murder of Bill Fullalove is especially gruesome and sadistic. Of course, it would not be a Mitchell tale without an element of the supernatural, this time an old tale of a parson who was found dead, slumped over a gate near Groaning Spinney, having either been set upon or been roaring drunk. I like to think the latter. On Christmas Eve there is a report of a sighting of the ghost over the gate and later Bill Fullalove’s body is found in the same position.

The book is set around Christmas time, at least the opening chapters are. Mrs Bradley has chosen to spend the festive period with her nephew, Jonathan LeStrange, and his wife, Deborah, in their new house near Groaning Spinney. In a spirit of neighbourliness, Jonathan invites Tiny and Bill Fullalove to spend Christmas there and, to their dismay, they bring two unexpected guests, a naturalist and an archaeologist. Mrs Bradley, who murder most foul follows round, takes an instant dislike to them all and, unbeknown to Johnathan, Deborah has her own reasons for disliking Tiny.

As well as Bill, their housekeeper goes missing, presumed dead and probably murdered, the Fullalove’s dogs and cats disappear, save for Worry, and several of the worthies in the village receive anonymous letters. As Mrs Bradley digs into the mystery she discovers an insurance fraud, tangled marital relationships, and dishonour amongst thieves. She is certain she has got to the bottom of things by the three-quarter mark of the book but what she lacks is proof. Slowly but surely, she recovers the typewriter, unravels the fraud and the identity of the supposed beneficiaries, and sets her plan to bring everything to a head which they do in a dramatic and tragic denouement. Mrs Bradley evinces no remorse over the chain reaction she has set in motion.

There is a languid feel to the investigation which is stretched over some months, and this reflects itself in the narrative which lacks a bit of oomph until the end. The book seems overlong as much of the mystery has evaporated long before the reader reaches the final page. Unusually, I got the sense that Mitchell rather undercooked the supernatural element, which was acknowledged, formed a central part of Will’s murder, but was left hanging in the air.

Mitchell compensates for some of the plot’s deficiencies with her usual acerbic wit, and some fine descriptive writing, becoming almost Loracian in her appreciation of the terrain and its stark beauty. She also produces some fine characters, most notably Ed Brown whose encyclopaedic knowledge of the area’s flora becomes invaluable to all parties. There is also a Dickensian feel to the names she has bestowed on some of the protagonists, enhancing the sense of a place stuck in a time warp. Her chauffeur, George, appears from time to time in the story, but her secretary, Laura, only fleetingly.

It was an enjoyable read and certainly one I would recommend to someone looking to see what Mitchell was all about. Be warned, though, compared with her earlier novels, this is very much an outlier.

Witches’ Broom

A winter woodland walk, an opportunity to admire the deciduous trees’ skeletal frames with their filigree of twigs against the lowering sky, to hear the creaking of the boughs in the wind. Something about a Silver Birch (Betula pendula) catches the eye, five dense, ball-like masses of stunted twigs hanging from its branches. The mind runs riot. Creations of an industrious mammal or home to an unusually large bird? The truth more prosaic; a woody deformity known as Witches’ broom.

While many woody plant species, whether deciduous or evergreen, are prone to developing Witches’ brooms, in Britain they are usually seen on birch. Some trees have one, others several, and they can form anywhere from the lower parts of the tree to the uppermost branches. They also vary in size, some barely detectible with the naked eye, others large and easily seen, even in the summer.

Witches’ brooms have an uncanny resemblance to a besom, a broom made from a bundle of twigs. As well as for sweeping floors, besoms, at least in popular imagination, were used by witches to fly around on, the first depiction of which appeared in marginalia of a 1451 edition of Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des Dames. It was an easy leap for the mediaeval mind to believe that these masses of twiggy growths were deposited by witches in the first place, especially in the absence of a more rational explanation.

In mediaeval Germany they were called “Hexenbesen”, which, translated directly into English, gives us Witches’ broom as well as the verb “to hex”, to bewitch, and “besom”. Witches also used them as stopping places or nests (“Hexennester”), as did elves, hobgoblins, and mares. Mares were spirits whose particular trait was to sit on the chest of a sleeper and cause them to have bad dreams, from which we have derived the word nightmare. “Mahrnester” or mare’s nest is the alternative German word for a Witches’ broom.

Unlike Mistletoe, with which they are often confused, Witches’ brooms are not parasites stealing the water and nutrients of their unfortunate hosts but forms of abnormal growth in the tree’s cells. When growing normally, a tree or shrub will exhibit what botanists call apical dominance, the plant producing a hormone, auxin, which slows the growth of the lateral or side stems and allows the central or apical stem to grow taller and compete for light.

Organisms such as fungi, mites, aphids, ironically, Mistletoe, and in British birches the ascomycete fungus, Taphrina betulina, can upset this process by inducing the tree to create cytokinin, a form of phytohormone, which interferes with its ability to regulate bud growth in a certain area. Green buds first appear on the tree and can often remain as buds for several years until they grow into shortened branches or slender twigs. Each of these will then potentially produce more small buds which will either fall off or themselves sprout into yet more twigs. Over time the tree will have produced a bundle of tightly packed twigs in that area.

Some defect in the tree, often caused by scarring or clumsy pruning, offers the micro-organisms the opportunity to enter the tree and trigger the formation of brooms. They rarely harm the tree, just reducing flowering in the affected area of the tree. They also offer a haven for other organisms, although not to witches, several species of moth reliant upon certain types of Witches’ brooms for food and shelter for their larvae.