The generic name Cytisus is said to be a corruption of the name of a Greek island, Cythnus, where Broom abounded, though it is probable that the Broom known to the ancients, and mentioned by Pliny and by Virgil under the name of Genista , was another species, the Spanish Broom, Spartium junceum , as the Common Broom is in Greece and not found in Southern and Eastern Europe, being chiefly a native of Western, Northern and Central Europe. It is likewise the Genista figured by the German botanists and pharmacologists of the sixteenth century. Broom was used in ancient Anglo-Saxon medicine and by the Welsh physicians of the early Middle Ages. It had a place in the London Pharmacopceia of 1618 and is included in the British Pharmacopoeia of the present day. And is a shrub that growyth in a place that is forsaken, stony and untylthed.
Presence thereof is witnesse that the ground is bareyne and drye that it groweth in.
And hath many braunches knotty and hard. It grows to a height of 3 to 5 feet and produces numerous long, straight, slender bright green branches, tough and very flexible, smooth and prominently angled. The leaves are alternate, hairy when young the lower ones shortly stalked, with three small, oblong leaflets, the upper ones, near the tips of the branches, sessile and small, often reduced to a single leaflet. They are nearly black when mature. They burst with a sharp report when the seeds are ripe flinging them to a distance by the spring-iike twisting of the valves or sides of the pods.