Tawny aromatic blooms

The yellow blaze of gorse (or furze) blossom is all over our coasts, moors and mountains now; later on in summer it may catch fire and blaze with smoke and flame - its high oil content means it burns well. It once kept many a cotter's fire going through the winter, and foddered his animals too, so long as the spines were crushed. The vanilla/coconut fragrance of the flowers can be heady on a warm day but people vary in the extent to which they can smell it.

Although it dazzles most fiercely in the spring, you can be sure to find gorse in bloom somewhere at any time of the year hence the old country saying 'when gorse is out of blossom, kissing's out of fashion'. It's said that the great Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus, who established the system of scientific taxonomy, when he visited England in 1736 and beheld the gorse in flower on Putney Hath, knelt before the bushes to give thanks to God for such a glorious sight.

Now, it's been disputed whether Linnaeus would really have seen much gorse blossom on the occasion of his August visit, and whether he would not have already been familiar with the species in his native land. Apocryphal or not, the story inspired Oscar Wilde in his epistle De Profundis, written from his cell in Reading gaol in 1897.

I tremble with pleasure when I think that on the very day of my leaving prison both the laburnum and the lilac will be blooming in the gardens, and that I shall see the wind stir into restless beauty the swaying gold of the one, and make the other toss the pale purple of its plumes, so that all the air shall be Arabia for me. Linnaeus fell on his knees and wept for joy when he saw for the first time the long heath of some English upland made yellow with the tawny aromatic brooms of the common furze; and I know that for me, to whom flowers are part of desire, there are tears waiting in the petals of some rose. It has always been so with me from my boyhood. There is not a single colour hidden away in the chalice of a flower, or the curve of a shell, to which, by some subtle sympathy with the very soul of things, my nature does not answer.

Ulex europaeus is the scientific name. Carl was not as verbose as Oscar.