Herbariuma Backpackers project
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Spanish gorse

Genista hispanica

Family · Fabaceae · Irritating

Spanish gorse (Genista hispanica)Spanish gorse (Genista hispanica)
Isidre blanc, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Herbarium of the University of Coimbra (COI), CC BY 4.0

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.

Where it grows

Uplands · Scrubland · Fields and pasture

Also known as

Spanish broom bush

In flower

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.

Sources