Genista hirsuta

Genista hirsuta is a spiny, densely branched evergreen shrub of the Fabaceae family, typically 30 to 100 centimetres tall, forming compact rounded cushions; the woody, ascending stems are deeply ridged and conspicuously clothed in long, spreading white hairs, with the lateral branches modified into rigid, sharp-tipped axillary spines. The small, simple, sessile leaves are oblong-lanceolate to elliptic, 4 to 10 millimetres long, with an entire margin, an acute apex and a silky-hairy surface, often falling early so that the green spiny stems carry out much of the photosynthesis. In late spring and early summer the plant produces short, dense, terminal racemes of bright golden-yellow pea-shaped flowers about 8 to 12 millimetres long, with a hairy, two-lipped tubular calyx and a standard petal often slightly tinged with reddish veining. The fruit is a flattened, ovate-oblong, densely white-hairy legume pod 8 to 14 millimetres long, containing one to four small smooth seeds. Native to the western Mediterranean basin, particularly the Iberian Peninsula and northwest Africa, it grows on dry, acidic, rocky and sandy soils of garrigue, open pine woodland and degraded scrub.