a beating heart in winter (2024)
gorse blooms like sulfurtone fire in the snow. gorse has haemoglobin. I know it doesn't bleed, but
Gorse is so cool. pictured above is their mechanically-triggered pollen Blast that they use to coat bees in soooo much pollen. A suitably strong bee will go to an unactivated (closed) flower and press up on one petal and down on another. This causes a mechanical release within the flower which basically shotguns the bee right in the face with pollen.
If you find an unactivated gorse flower, which can be really hard to do because bees are little busybodies, you can (gently) activate the flower by finding the innermost petals and pressing them apart with your fingertips.
as referenced in the caption on my painting, gorse has HAEMOGLOBIN!! It’s convergent evolution here, & not really blood, but it’s weird and used fr the same purpose we use haemoglobin: oxygen transport. Gorse brings oxygen to the nitrogen fixing bacteria at its roots , if u don’t know what that means, it means gorse is one of the v-important plants that take nitrogen & turn it into a form other plants can use :)
In crop rotating, it’s good to put a nitrogen fixer in a field every now & then to keep the soil good. Probably don’t use gorse for that, it’s far too aggressive.
…
That is a problem with gorse, it’s tenacious. In the past in it’s native range it would be healthily suppressed by human use. It’s flowers can b brewed into alcohol and its thorny branches would be ground down into nutritional animal food. Now humans don’t do that & it takes over. + it outcompetes rare ecosystem that would normally be too disturbed (by harvesting, being walked on, etc) for gorse to grow. + it’s invasive in places like New Zealand where Scottish colonisers brought it over bc they were homesick , allegedly.
This can be a Problem since gorse is v flammable and that isn’t so much of a problem in soggy scotland but if you put it somewhere dry. Flames
…
I love it tho, im in its native range and I like to get scratched up by it when exploring.
