Spanish gorse
Genista hispanica
Family · Fabaceae · Irritating
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The low spiny cushion covering limestone slopes of the northeastern Peninsula and filling with yellow flowers in May. It pricks hard, stays low and is practically impossible to walk through.
Uplands · Scrubland · Fields and pasture
Also known asSpanish broom bush
How to tell it
A shrub twenty to sixty centimetres, dense and cushion-forming, its old branches armed with branched spines. Minute simple leaves, hairy beneath, only on young shoots. Small yellow flowers in dense heads at the tips. Range: mainly a Spanish plant, practically absent from Portugal.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
No use
It is good at holding eroded slopes and protecting tree seedlings, which grow up among the spines where livestock cannot reach. Such a thicket is, in practice, a nursery.
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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