Gorse attacks
Tuesday, June 5th, 2007
Gorse — kind of rhymes with “curse” — got its start on the Oregon Coast courtesy of Bandon founder George Bennet, an Irish nobleman who came here in the 1870s and brought with him the flowery, spiny, ultra inflammable plant. He probably thought it reminded him of Winnie the Pooh, a book that hadn’t even been written yet.
Had he seen further into the future, he would have left it home. Gorse is beautiful but unstoppable. It is the kudzu of the Northwest, though not nearly as fast growing. It has bright yellow flowers in the spring and spines like sewing machine needles year-round.
It also has resin so rich that you can hold a match to a green leaf and light it.
In the last century and a half, gorse has expanded like a weed up and down the coast and has even headed inland. So thick and impenetrable is the weed that an airplane once crash landed in the gorse near Bandon Airport; the pilot was all right but a bulldozer was required to reach him.
It’s essentially unremovable. Use any method short of a thermonuclear blast to cut, chop, poison or scrape it away, and it will be back like hair next year.
And, of course, it burns like gasoline. In 1936, the Bandon gorse caught fire. The conflagration was so intense the the fire department finally gave up and sent its firefighters home to rescue their families. Half the town burned to the ground, and 11 people died.
