Genista tenera (Madeira Broom)

Plate 1 figs. a–h · 8 separate observations

Genista tenera, photographed by Vítor Jorge — fig. a Vítor Jorge, CC BY 4.0 / 2021-12-12 / obs. 172228330

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 1 botanical country

Native distribution of Genista tenera, 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
Madeira	MDR	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.

Where it actually grows measured, from 141 observations

Condition	5th percentile	Median	95th percentile
Coldest month, mean daily low	7.4 °C	10.4 °C	13.6 °C
Warmest month, mean daily high	22.3 °C	23.0 °C	23.9 °C
Annual rainfall	1,771 mm	2,253 mm	2,651 mm
Rainfall in the driest quarter	75 mm	98 mm	124 mm

It is barely found anywhere that freezes. This is not care advice and it is not a forecast. It is a measurement: we sampled the climate at every one of the 141 research-grade observations of Genista tenera 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 Reading one as the other would place a plant several zones too warm, so we do not publish a hardiness zone, because we do not have one.

Also published as 16 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 congestus (Willd.) Ball
Cytisus tener Jacq. ex Murray
Cytisus tener Jacq.
Cytisus virgatus (Aiton) Vuk.
Cytisus virgatus Link
Galactia tenera Kuntze
Genista congesta (Willd.) Poir.
Genista gracilis Poir.
Genista microphylla Webb & Berthel.
Genista virgata (Aiton) Link
Spartium congestum Willd.
Spartium virgatum Aiton
Telinaria congesta (Willd.) C.Presl
Telinaria virgata (Aiton) C.Presl
Teline congesta (Willd.) Webb & Berthel.
Teline osyrioides subsp. sericea (Kuntze) del Arco

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.