Old fashioned, hand-made brooms, are a rare art form these days. Chelsea Townsend, a professional broom maker, and her friend, Gypsy Elaine Teague, an elder high priestess, joined forces to write a book to help novices start crafting their own handmade besoms. The book is part theory, part practice. An American, southern cultural influence underlies the folk magic and practices.
The history and lore of broom making opens Section 1 and from there the language of broom making teaches the vocabulary required to order materials and understand the directions or broom recipes, as they call them. This is practical information that any crafter would require. Readers will likely need to look back at this section to understand instructions later in the book. Besides materials, the new crafter will also need specialized tools which are described. From this point, they introduce briefly the traditional uses of brooms in rituals and magic.
Section 2, the larger part of the book, explores the properties of nearly 60 wood species. This information includes the botanical order, family, genus and species; whether the wood has a feminine or masculine energy, elements associated with it, Gods and Goddesses associated with the wood in mythology and their properties. Some of the deities are familiar Greek or Norse but some like the Cherokee deities from Oklahoma are less widely known. Additionally, the book has a frequency rating, a vibrational scale the authors attribute to all of the woods, from most positive energy (holly) to most negative vibe (poison ivy). The authors keep an epi-pen and use antihistamines to work on poison ivy which sounds crazy and I can’t really recommend it. You poison garden people know who you are and can decide whether risking life and limb, pun intended, is worth it.
The woods in the book favor southern American tree varieties but there is significant crossover of many trees into northern climates. Every wood is given a couple of pages of information covering the practical aspects of woodworking with the species to the magical uses. The authors include some rituals, for instance, finding love with a mulberry broom or using a Golden Rain tree broom to look for uncharted lands or subjects or cast a circle for one’s endeavors.
Section 3 includes broom making recipes. Complete instructions and some black and white photos detail how to make a broom like the one pictured. This section reminds me of trying to understand book instructions for crafts in my childhood before the advent of internet videos. If you’re new to this craft, you’re probably also going to want to seek out a video or a live teacher to show you how it’s done. Between the static photos and the new vocabulary, there will be a learning curve. Everything you need to know is included in the book. A couple of appendices at the back allow readers to quickly look up which deity is associated with which wood and the uses of these woods. There’s also a couple page bibliography and index.
Broom making is a remarkably thorough book and may inspire a resurgence of this craft in the Craft.
Recommended
~review by Larissa Carlson
Author: Chelsea Townsend and Gypsy Elaine Teague
Llewellyn Worldwide, 2025
278 pages, $18.99
