A plant with spiny, dark green leaves that grows into tall and thick bushes with small yellow flowers, also called whin or furze; Frodo and Sam encountered tall stands of gorse bushes as they travelled through Ithilien. At one time a related species of plant was found in Middle-earth: a taller, white-flowering variety of gorse known as snowthorn or (in Elvish) aeglos. The snowthorn is only ever recorded as growing in Beleriand, and is now extinct (it was perhaps lost in the cataclysm at the end of the First Age).