Genista scorpius

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Genista scorpius, photographed by Joan Simon — fig. b Joan Simon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 197452275

Genista scorpius, photographed by David Delon — fig. c David Delon, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189912900

Genista scorpius, photographed by Tim Johnson — fig. e Tim Johnson, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 188735241

Genista scorpius, photographed by Y. Liu — fig. f Y. Liu, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 189230004

Genista scorpius, photographed by Martin Kleikamp — fig. h Martin Kleikamp, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202634639

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 3 botanical countries

Native distribution of Genista scorpius, 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
France	FRA	EUROPE
Spain	SPA
Morocco	MOR	AFRICA

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 522 in flower of 724 examined

44%

66%

82%

92%

80%

32%

27%

39%

Proportion of examined Genista scorpius in flower, by month
Month	In flower	Examined	Share	95% interval
Jan	8	18	44%	25% to 66%
Feb	31	47	66%	52% to 78%
Mar	115	141	82%	74% to 87%
Apr	236	256	92%	88% to 95%
May	99	123	80%	73% to 87%
Jun	12	38	32%	19% to 47%
Jul	1	23	4%	1% to 21%
Aug	0	9	0%	0% to 30%
Sep	0	13	0%	0% to 23%
Oct	4	15	27%	11% to 52%
Nov	9	23	39%	22% to 59%
Dec	7	18	39%	20% to 61%

Peak flowering in Apr. Each bar is the share of Genista scorpius 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. 522 of 724 examined observations were in flower, every one of them research grade. The whisker on each bar is a 95% Wilson interval. 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 2,011 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	-2.3 °C	0.5 °C	3.5 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	23.6 °C	28.2 °C	32.2 °C
Annual rainfall	395 mm	623 mm	1,160 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	44 mm	93 mm	185 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 2,011 research-grade observations of Genista scorpius 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 23 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.

Argelasia scorpius (L.) Fourr.
Corniola melia (Boiss.) K.Koch
Corniola scorpius (L.) C.Presl
Corothamnus purgans (L.) Ponert
Cytisus purgans (L.) Boiss.
Dendrospartum purgans (L.) Spach ex Walp.
Drymospartum purgans (L.) C.Presl
Genista daurica G.Nicholson
Genista melia Boiss.
Genista myriantha Ball
Genista purgans L.
Genista scorpia St.-Lag.
Genista scorpius subsp. mesatlantica Emb. & Maire
Genista scorpius var. acutangula Vayr.
Genista scorpius var. campylocarpa Willk.
Genista scorpius var. macracantha Rouy & Foucaud
Genista spiniflora Lam.
Lebeckia scorpius (L.) Thunb.
Sarothamnus purgans (L.) Godr.
Scorpius vulgaris Pourr. ex Willk. & Lange
Spartium purgans (L.) L.
Spartium scorpius L.
Spartocytisus purgans (L.) Webb & Berthel.

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.
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.