Spanish broom
Spartium junceum
Family · Fabaceae · Poisonous
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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.
Emergency
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The broom with green, cylindrical, almost leafless stems and large yellow flowers whose intense scent carries tens of metres. It covers road banks throughout the south.
Roadsides and waste ground · Scrubland · Uplands · Fields and pasture
Also known asweaver's broom, rush broom
How to tell it
Green, smooth, cylindrical hollow stems like thick rushes, doing the photosynthesis instead of leaves. The leaves are few, small and shed early. Golden yellow flowers two to three centimetres, far larger than other brooms', strongly scented. Flat pods, black when dry.
What it is confused with
White broom
Retama monosperma
White broom has white flowers and drooping greyish stems; this has large yellow flowers and bright green upright stems. Both species' seeds are toxic.
What it is for
The stem fibres were used for ropes and coarse cloth, hence the English name weaver's broom. Nothing is eaten: the seeds contain cytisine, the same alkaloid as laburnum, causing vomiting, convulsions and respiratory arrest in high dose.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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