CXXXVI.— THE DWARF GORSE. 
U/ex minor Roth. 
T he beauty of the golden blossoms of the Gorse, rich alike in colour and in 
perfume, against their admirable background of dull blue-green is a landscape 
feature better seen, perhaps, in England than in any other country. Gorse is one of 
the few social plants which is so strikingly dominant as to give a popular name to 
its associations. Enclosures have lessened the number of “ Furze-brakes,” and it is 
not very easy to state the ecological conditions under which they occur. The 
Common Gorse seems to prefer a well-drained sub-soil : it flourishes even in the 
loose shingle of the sea-shore, on pure sand or on limestone ; but it seems to do 
better on chalk when there is a surface layer of loam or on a clayey gravel, rather 
than on stiff clay. Gerard writes : — 
“The greatest and highest that I did ever see do grow about Excester, in the West Parts of England ” ; 
and certainly on the high ground of Exmoor or the Devonian hills from Minehead 
to the Cornish border the plant luxuriates in the mild climate and reaches dimensions 
seldom elsewhere exceeded. The Red Deer is frequently well concealed in brakes 
seven or eight feet in height. 
Nor is the beauty of its masses of bloom dependent merely upon our 
associations with our own land. The circumstantial tradition that Linnaeus, when 
in England in 1736, on first seeing the Gorse in blossom, on Putney Heath, fell on 
his knees and thanked God for its beauty, is said to be apocryphal ; but the 
testimony of the late Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, if suggestive of a love of home, is 
based upon a clear artistic reason. 
“ I have never seen in the Tropics," he writes in his “ Malay Archipelago,' ’ “ such brilliant masses of colour as even England 
can show in her Furze-clad commons, her glades of wild Hyacinths, her fields of Poppies, her meadows of Buttercups and 
Orchises, carpets of yellow, purple, azure blue, and fiery crimson, which the Tropics can rarely exhibit." 
There is a well-known proverb that kissing is not out of season as long as the 
Gorse is in bloom, which is based upon the fact that some Gorse can be found in 
flower at almost any season ; but those who have made this observation in Natural 
History have not, perhaps, noticed that it depends upon the existence of two, if not 
three, distinct species, each of which has its own season of flowering. The Common 
Gorse {JJlex europceus Linn6) does, it is true, bloom twice in the year and puts out 
occasional blossoms at all seasons; but from July to November the most conspicuous 
Gorse blossoms in the landscape are those of the Dwarf Gorse {Ulex minor Roth). 
It is true that, when stunted by wind and weather on the beach, or when, as it 
may be, browsed down by cattle, the Common Gorse may appear low-growing ; but 
it can generally be readily distinguished from Ulex minor by its blossoms. Roth, 
who first described this latter species in his “ Catalecta Botanica,” in 1797, says of it 
that it is but half the size of U. europceus in all its parts : its branches are more 
