Cytisus villosus (hairybroom)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Cytisus villosus, photographed by Josep Gesti — fig. a Josep Gesti, CC BY-SA 4.0 / 2022-05-01 / obs. 192955360

Cytisus villosus, photographed by Alessia Guggisberg — fig. c Alessia Guggisberg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189299502

Cytisus villosus, photographed by Nico Hernandez — fig. f Nico Hernandez, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 89251941

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Native range 14 botanical countries

Native distribution of Cytisus villosus, after Kew’s World Checklist of Vascular Plants. Introduced, extinct and doubtful records are excluded, so this is where the plant is from, not everywhere it now grows. Regions too small to draw at this scale are marked with a dot.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Corse	COR
France	FRA
Greece	GRC
Italy	ITA
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Sardegna	SAR
Sicilia	SIC
Spain	SPA
Ukraine	UKR
Algeria	ALG	AFRICA
Morocco	MOR
Tunisia	TUN
Türkiye	TUR	ASIA-TEMPERATE

Region boundaries approximated from Natural Earth (public domain) and mapped to TDWG World Geographical Scheme for Recording Plant Distributions (WGSRPD) level-3 botanical countries (Brummitt 2001). Indicative, not the official WGSRPD geometry.

Flowering 34 in flower of 60 examined

40%

87%

60%

Proportion of examined Cytisus villosus in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	2	5	40%	12% to 77%
Feb	3	4	too few examined
Mar	13	15	87%	62% to 96%
Apr	13	15	87%	62% to 96%
May	3	5	60%	23% to 88%
Jun	0	5	0%	0% to 43%
Jul	0	2	too few examined
Aug	0	0	too few examined
Sep	0	4	too few examined
Oct	0	1	too few examined
Nov	0	4	too few examined
Dec	0	0	too few examined

Peak flowering in Mar. Each bar is the share of Cytisus villosus observations in which someone actually recorded the reproductive state and found the plant in flower, not the raw number of flowering records. That distinction matters: people observe plants far more in spring than in winter, so a bare count of flowering records partly measures when people go outside. Dividing by the number examined removes that. 34 of 60 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 7 months have fewer than 5 examined observations, so no proportion is drawn for them. This is still a global aggregate and not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres. Where a species has fewer than 30 flowering records we do not draw this chart at all. Computed from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Where it actually grows measured, from 308 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-0.2 °C	3.3 °C	8.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	24.1 °C	27.5 °C	30.3 °C
Annual rainfall	627 mm	868 mm	1,189 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	36 mm	96 mm	174 mm

It is found where winters bring light frost. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 308 research-grade observations of Cytisus villosus that carry a coordinate, and this is the range those places actually span. The 5th and 95th percentiles are used rather than the minimum and maximum, because a single cultivated specimen in a heated conservatory should not widen a tropical plant's range to the Arctic.

This is not a hardiness zone. A USDA zone is the average annual extreme minimum temperature. The figure above is the mean daily minimum of the coldest month, which is a different quantity and is typically far warmer. Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one. Climate from CHELSA V2.1 (Karger et al. 2017); occurrences from 10.15468/dl.cgje2x.

Also published as 9 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

Cytisus affinis C.Presl
Cytisus barcinonensis Sennen
Cytisus mollis Willd.
Cytisus triflorus L'Hér.
Cytisus triflorus var. bidentatus Chabert
Cytisus triflorus var. glabrescens C.Vicioso
Genista triflorus var. villosus (Pourr.) DC.
Laburnum molle J.Presl
Lembotropis affinis (C.Presl) C.Presl

Sourcesevery claim on this page

World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.
Wikidata. common name (P1843), joined on the World Flora Online identifier (P7715). CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-13.
Kew, World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP v16). native distribution by TDWG level-3 botanical country, and life form. CC BY 3.0. Retrieved 2026-06-04.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice and no toxicity claim, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.