Spanish broom

Spartium junceum

Family · Fabaceae · Poisonous

Toxic

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 green, cylindrical, almost leafless stems and large yellow flowers whose intense scent carries tens of metres. It covers road banks throughout the south.

Where it grows

Roadsides and waste ground · Scrubland · Uplands · Fields and pasture

Also known as

weaver's broom, rush broom

In flower

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

Confusion that poisons

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.

Sources

Flora-On