Gorse

Bill Meek looks at a commonly found native species which provides winter colour.

Any flowers daring to brave the frosts by blooming in winter and early spring tend to belong to introduced garden species brought here specifically for that purpose – to provide unseasonal colour.

An honourable exception is our common native gorse, whose cheery yellow pea-flowers are on show on Lincolnshire’s waysides and heathy marginal land throughout the winter – indeed throughout the year.

‘When gorse is in bloom, kissing is in season’ goes the old saying, which is a way of saying that gorse never really goes out of flower.

Naturalists in Lincolnshire have been noting the timing of gorse’s flowers since the 1800s. The yellow flowers have been recorded here in every month of the year except, interestingly, July and August – otherwise our floweriest months. March is the month with the most records of gorse in flower, although April has almost as many. In spring the massed yellow flowers of gorse can provide a spectacular landscape feature, and when occurring en masse, gorse flowers exude a powerful, and slightly unexpected, smell of coconut.

Two varieties
This curious pattern of flowering is explained by there being not one but two strains of gorse, thought to be genetically distinct and often growing side by side. The first thing to say is that both kinds, with their colourful, scented flowers, are obviously designed to attract flying insects (although gorse is partly self-fertile), and these are in very short supply in winter.

The two strains look identical yet differ in their strategies – one produces flowers throughout the winter months in order to escape the attentions of a small seed-eating insect, the Gorse Seed Weevil, which cannot tolerate the cold.

This kind of gorse naturally finds pollinators harder to come by, and must flower for longer to take advantage of the rare mild days when flying insects are about.

When these more congenial interludes occur, this kind of gorse finds itself with very little competition for pollinators, but such a strategy can easily backfire.

The second type puts on a shorter but far more spectacular display of flowers in spring. With pollinators now plentiful, these plants can set copious seed, enough to overwhelm the weevils’ appetite and ensure their survival despite the onslaught.

If you inspect the seed pods of gorse you may find tiny holes made by the weevils. The adult insect, should you find one, is tiny but charismatic on close inspection, with a long, snout-like projection on its head, called a rostrum.

On a warm, dry day you may hear gorse pods popping open with an audible crackling sound. This is when the adult Gorse Seed Weevils are released into the world.

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