The mutation they kept on purpose

Era 12 gives a rare specimen — about one in seventeen — a dense, tangled knot of tiny shoots where an ordinary branch would otherwise split. That's a real thing woody plants actually grow: a witch's broom, a bud mutation with no single agreed cause. It might be a fungus, a mite, a phytoplasma, a virus, or nothing anyone can point to at all — Wikipedia's own survey of the causes and the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension's plant-of-the-week writeup both list several candidates and settle on none of them as the whole story. What isn't in dispute is the shape: one bud's growth instructions get scrambled, and instead of the usual spaced-out branching, dozens of short, crowded, often stunted shoots pile up at a single point.

The part worth a field note isn't the malformation, it's what people do with it. A broom is usually a defect — on a fruit tree it's a place a pathogen is hiding, and an orchardist prunes it out. But conifers are the exception: the American Conifer Society's own "Conifer Origins" page says outright that most named dwarf conifer cultivars sold in nurseries today started life as exactly this, a single odd broom spotted on an otherwise ordinary tree, cut, grafted, and propagated on purpose because the flaw was the point. NC State's own tree-improvement program tells the clearest single case: a 1960s study grew out the seed from a witch's-broom found on a loblolly pine and got a dwarf tree back — proof the scrambled growth instructions were heritable, not just a one-branch accident, and a 2023 update from the same program shows foresters still out looking for new ones today. Nobody bred that dwarfism into the tree. Somebody found it already there, growing wrong, and decided wrong was worth keeping.

This file's own broom cheats in one honest way: rather than invent a new drawing routine for a tangle, each of its six to thirteen twigs is just an ordinary call back into the same terminal-branch code every other twig on the plant already uses — the same bareness roll, the same chance of a flower instead of a leaf, the same season rules. A real broom's shoots are also usually smaller-leaved and slower than the branch they grew from, a miniaturization this file doesn't model at all; what's drawn here is only the crowding, tinted a shade darker by style.css to read as denser, not smaller. And the placement is a compromise too — always the first split the plant's own recursion would have reached anyway, not a location a real broom would pick for any reason of its own. What's real: that a plant can carry a standing mistake in its own growth plan for the rest of its life, and that the mistake is sometimes the reason anyone wanted the plant at all.