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Low toxicity🍽️ Edible☠️ To avoid

🟡 Common Gorse

Ulex europaeus · Fabacées

🌳 Temperate Europe🐚 Coastline
🧠 To remember it"Gorse pricks but smells like coconut" — one of the few shrubs that pairs a formidable defensive armor with a sweet, delicious scent, a contrast that helps you remember it instantly.
Common Gorse — Ulex europaeus

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

An impossible-to-miss shrub: completely transformed into a dense tangle of rigid, sharp spines, with adult leaves also reduced to thorns. Covered in winter and spring with bright golden-yellow flowers that have a characteristic coconut scent in the sun, contrasting sharply with its aggressive foliage.

  1. fully spiky shrub: stems and adult leaves transformed into rigid, dark green spines
  2. golden-yellow flowers of 12-15 mm, highly fragrant with a coconut scent in the sun
  3. blooming possible almost year-round, peaking between February and June
  4. hairy black pods that burst open when mature
  5. forms dense, impenetrable thickets, often in colonies on heaths and dunes
Size1-3 m (shrub)
FloweringFebruary-June (sometimes year-round)
Habitatheaths, wasteland, coastal dunes, embankments, poor acidic soils

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Scotch Broom (similar yellow flowers, no thorns) (Cytisus scoparius)no real dangerous confusion: both full plants should be avoided for consumption, as only gorse flowers have a documented culinary use

To tell them apart: gorse pricks intensely (rigid spines everywhere), while broom has flexible, smooth twigs with no thorns at all

🍽️ Eating it

Partsflower petals
Seasonfévrier-juin
Tastesweet, subtle coconut flavor

Preparation : only the petals, carefully picked between the thorns, can be eaten raw in small quantities to garnish salads or infuse for their coconut scent; the rest of the plant (spiky leaves, pods, seeds) is not edible and has no documented food use

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • traditionally crushed with a mill or mallet to soften its thorns and serve as winter fodder for livestock in poor regions of Brittany and the British Isles, before modern forage crops took over
  • used as a Dr. Bach flower remedy ("Gorse") to symbolize hopelessness, under its English name
Sources (2)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.