Broom Crowberry

Size, growth and what to expect

No source rates its growth, so our growth estimator treats it as slow, like our mountain laurel. It makes a dense, much-branched mat 6 inches to 2 feet tall, with narrow leaves an eighth to a quarter inch long, and it is long-lived.

Small heads of flowers open at the shoot tips from late April into May. They have no petals, and the purple stamens and pistils give the plants a purple cast. The fruit is a tiny dry drupe, and ants carry the seeds away.

It grows wild along the Atlantic coast from Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to Maine, Massachusetts and the New Jersey Pine Barrens, and inland only on the Shawangunk Ridge of New York. Its home is open sand, pine barrens, sand hills and rocky summits of acid rock, where fire or thin soil keeps other shrubs out.

How to grow Broom Crowberry

Broom crowberry needs full sun, and shrubs that grow over it shade it out. It wants a dry, acid, sandy or rocky soil low in nutrients, like the barrens and ledges where it grows wild. Set plants 2 feet apart and keep them 2 feet from a wall. At its size it can go within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them in spring or fall in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper, and put the sandy soil back in. Mulch lightly with pine needles, if at all, and keep taller plants away. Broom crowberry is hard to raise from seed, and every treatment tried has given few seedlings. In the wild, seedlings come up in the year or two after a fire, and smoke may help.

Water through dry spells in the first summer only. Deer browse it hard, so cage young plants where deer are common. Do not step on it, since trampling harms it. It needs no pruning.

Plants are male or female, and only females bear fruit, so plant three or more seedlings for a male and a female. Male plants show the long purple stamens in spring. A hot fire kills the plants outright.