Hairy broom
Adenocarpus complicatus
Family · Fabaceae · Poisonous
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
The broom with three-leaflet leaves folded down the middle, and pods covered in sticky warts, which is what gives the genus its name. It covers schist and granite slopes across the interior.
Scrubland · Uplands · Roadsides and waste ground · Oak woods
Also known asglandular broom
How to tell it
A shrub one to three metres. Leaves of three leaflets, folded along the midrib like a half-closed book, in bunches. Yellow pea flowers in short racemes at the tips. The pods are the mark: covered in wart-like glands, visible and sticky to touch.
What it is confused with
Peeling broom
Adenocarpus decorticans
They are in the same genus and share the warty pods. Adenocarpus decorticans has bark peeling in strips and is mainly southeastern Spanish; codesso does not peel and is the common species in Portugal. Neither is eaten.
Open sheet →What it is for
No food use. Like brooms in general it contains quinolizidine alkaloids and poisons livestock that eat it in quantity. It gave firewood and animal bedding, and it is a plant that fixes nitrogen in poor soils.