Ten years ago, I found myself in Scotland looking in awe at the valley of Glen Coe. The valley looms above you, rising in a great sweep like an earthen tide. A wave of reds, browns, and greens, and hints of yellow.
It’s here that I found the homeland of one of British Columbia’s most intrusive and visible invaders, Scotch broom. Last June, I was perched upon the hill behind our house in the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw people, baking in the mid-Island heat, working hand in hand with my five-year-old daughter in a fight against this Hibernian herb.
The broom grips hard into the crevices of the rocky hillside, its snaky roots twisting deep down into the darkness searching for fertile soil. I brace against the stony slope; my fingers wrapped tightly around the base of the plant. I feel small arms wrap around my right calf, my daughter’s important contribution to our eradication efforts. Her small hands are protected in gardening gloves; the gloves themselves decorated in flowers more welcome in our garden and the wild space we find ourselves living in.
With a popping sound, the plant breaks free from the dirt, releasing the aromatic scent familiar to those enlisted in the crusade to rid our island of this invader. We fall backwards, landing gently between the mossy boulders lining the hillside. Looking upwards, the hill still blazes with what looks like a thousand yellow suns – a promise that our work is far from over.
In the late 1850s, Scottish settler Walter Colquhoun Grant brought seeds to Sooke as a garden ornamental. Long before then, Indigenous peoples had shaped and cared for these landscapes; burning, planting, and harvesting in ways that encouraged natural abundance and biodiversity.
The hill still blazes with what looks likea thousand yellow suns – a promise thatour work is far from over.
Meadows, forests, and shorelines were not “wild” in the settler sense. They were living gardens, shaped by fire, harvesting, and ceremony to sustain food plants like camas and to support balance in the land. Camas meadows, coastal forests, and open slopes were part of a managed mosaic, alive with food plants and pollinators. Into that balance came broom, a plant as adaptable and ambitious as the settlers themselves.
Hardy, resourceful, and energetic, it became the perfect garden plant, as well as being an incredibly efficient soil stabilizer. New arrivals, seeking stability and ties to their homeland, adopted Scotch broom as their talisman. Work crews carving out roads, bridges, and tunnels discovered the efficacy of this plant in preventing soil erosion, washouts, and landslides. It became a quick, living bandage for disturbed earth. Wherever humans could not make the land safe for settlers, broom could.
Scotch broom, with its delicate and blazing yellow flowers and a deep, vast net of roots, was a collaborator in the colonization of Vancouver Island. It’s not possible to drive Highway 1 during the late spring and early summer and not see evidence of this codependent relationship, this mutual parasitism: a vast yellow scar ripping through the landscape. We may no longer be able to see the blemish our roads make in the natural landscape, but in the form of Scotch broom, we see a canary ribbon, slowly tightening around the throat of our ecological biodiversity.
These seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades
But the same qualities that made the broom useful to newcomers make it an ecological menace. Rapid growth, deep roots, and prolific seeds allow it to crowd out native wildflowers and grasses, alter soil chemistry through nitrogen fixation, and create dense thickets that feed wildfires. In a time where the systems we exist in, both human and organic, are failing at an alarming rate, these hardy plants may appear as beacons of a more fertile future. However, the flowers quickly develop into large green pods with black seeds capable of invading almost anywhere. These seeds can lie dormant in the soil for decades, awaiting the conditions they require. Broken, bare earth and sunshine are all the plant needs to flourish.
The most successful method of destroying this emerald empire is to strike once it’s in bloom: allow the plant to concentrate all its hope and dreams for the future into the delicate buds of its yellow flowers, and then rip it out of the ground. Failing that, you can also make a large cut at its base using shears or a small saw, removing the bulk of the plant and leaving behind a stump that lacks the reserves to survive an ever-warming winter.
It’s hard, repetitive work. Focus is required, the kind that is rare in our distracted age, and maybe that’s why broom so often wins. It thrives on our inattention. But here, on this hill, attention is what we gave it, hour after hour under the hot June sun, hands in the soil, my daughter and I doing what we can to reclaim one small piece of land.
Several months later, we hike back up the same hillside, our pockets full of native seeds: milkweed, camas, and Clarkia amoena. We cast the seeds down onto the fertile and broken soil, hoping they’ll grow and take root where the broom once stood.
I think of the Snuneymuxw people who tended these hillsides for generations. Camas meadows are food, memory, and medicine. Their return can not only heal the land but carry forward that relationship of reciprocity and care.
And so, as the seeds fall, we imagine the hill in spring, blue camas flowers swaying in the wind, bees droning low over the blossoms, the air thick with the scent of the earth and renewal, and the land once again alive with the life that called it home.
Ben Wickham is a writer from Nanaimo, BC with a background in education and public service. His passions for writing and nature come from his father and mother respectively.
