settings

Wuthering Heights vocabulary

5 plants, trees, botany terms

< select a category

ALL

botany

This page requires javascript.

help & settings

[x]

display help icons

show definition by default

show uses by default

furze: synonyms: gorse, whin, Ulex ???

tags: [botany]

► definition

Definition:

a genus of very thorny evergreen plants in the warmer European climes. They are an aggressively invasive species in their non-native habitats, specifically in the western USA, Hawaii, southern South America, the antipodes and other locales.
The flowers are edible. The thorny bushes themselves are highly flammable and have been used as a fuel source.

^{photo: by Roger Griffith, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Whin_or_Gorse.jpg}

► uses

Uses:

Or broken bottles in the furze act as a burning glass in the sun. Archimedes.

James Joyce. Ulysses.

---

There was an inner circle [of sheep] closely huddled, and outside these they radiated wider apart, the pattern formed by the flock as a whole not being unlike a vandyked lace collar, to which the clump of furze-bushes stood in the position of a wearer's neck.

Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)

---

Tell her what Heathcliff is: an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation; an arid wilderness of furze and whinstone.

Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights (1847)