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.
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.
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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