Genista pilosa (hairy greenweed)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Genista pilosa, photographed by Thomas Koffel — fig. a Thomas Koffel, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-05-21 / obs. 199766953

Genista pilosa, photographed by David Sandler — fig. b David Sandler, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 196969520

Genista pilosa, photographed by Erwin Gruber — fig. c Erwin Gruber, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200765971

Genista pilosa, photographed by Michael Andresek — fig. d Michael Andresek, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 193458452

Genista pilosa, photographed by Christian Berg — fig. e Christian Berg, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 195027357

Genista pilosa, photographed by Gabriel Mayrhofer — fig. f Gabriel Mayrhofer, CC0 1.0 / obs. 194422289

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 18 botanical countries

Native distribution of Genista pilosa, 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.

Region	TDWG code	Continent
Albania	ALB	EUROPE
Austria	AUT
Belgium	BGM
Bulgaria	BUL
Czechia-Slovakia	CZE
Denmark	DEN
France	FRA
Germany	GER
Great Britain	GRB
Hungary	HUN
Italy	ITA
Krym	KRY
Netherlands	NET
NW. Balkan Pen.	YUG
Poland	POL
Romania	ROM
Spain	SPA
Switzerland	SWI

Not drawn on the map: Great Britain. We hold no public-domain boundary for this region, so it is listed rather than guessed at.

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 260 in flower of 287 examined

33%

95%

97%

63%

80%

67%

80%

Proportion of examined Genista pilosa in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	1	1	too few examined
Feb	2	2	too few examined
Mar	2	6	33%	10% to 70%
Apr	153	161	95%	91% to 97%
May	73	75	97%	91% to 99%
Jun	10	16	63%	39% to 82%
Jul	3	4	too few examined
Aug	4	5	80%	38% to 96%
Sep	1	3	too few examined
Oct	4	6	67%	30% to 90%
Nov	3	3	too few examined
Dec	4	5	80%	38% to 96%

Peak flowering in May. Each bar is the share of Genista pilosa 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. 260 of 287 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 5 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 1,712 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-7.2 °C	-3.7 °C	1.2 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	19.2 °C	23.6 °C	26.8 °C
Annual rainfall	565 mm	833 mm	1,619 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	81 mm	137 mm	311 mm

It is found where winters bring hard 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 1,712 research-grade observations of Genista pilosa 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 21 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.

Chamaesparton pilosum (L.) Fourr.
Cytisus pilosus (L.) Vuk.
Cytisus pilosus (L.) hort. ex Carrière
Genista humifusa Thore
Genista jordanii Shuttlew. ex Rouy & Foucaud
Genista nodosa Tausch
Genista pilosa f. jordanii Rouy
Genista pilosa prol. jordanii Rouy
Genista pilosa subsp. jordanii (Rouy) Braun-Blanq.
Genista pilosa var. campestris Boenn.
Genista pilosa var. erecta Lej.
Genista pilosa var. jordanii (Rouy) P.Fourn.
Genista pilosa var. microphylla Rouy
Genista pilosa var. nodosa (Tausch) K.Koch
Genista pilosa var. prostrata Lej.
Genista pilosa var. subalpina Rouy
Genista pilosa var. sylvatica Boenn.
Genista repens Lam.
Genistoides tuberculata Moench
Spartium pilosum (L.) Roth
Telinaria pilosa (L.) 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.