Gum rockrose
Cistus ladanifer
Family · Cistaceae · Harmless
The shrub that leaves your fingers sticky and fills the Alentejo with the smell of resin in May. Large white flowers, with or without a dark blotch at the base of each petal.
Scrubland · Uplands · Montado
Also known aslabdanum, laudanum rockrose
How to tell it
Touch a leaf: it turns sticky. That resin, labdanum, is the definitive tell, and on a hot day you smell it from a distance. Narrow dark leaves, joined in pairs at the base.
What it is confused with
Sage-leaved rockrose
Cistus salviifolius
Sage-leaved rockrose is low, with an oval wrinkled leaf like sage, and is not sticky. Gum rockrose is tall, narrow-leaved and always resinous.
Open sheet →What it is for
Labdanum is a perfumery raw material, harvested in Spain on an industrial scale. In Iberian folk medicine the plant had many uses, always external.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.