Abstract
This essay considers the history of gorse in the literary and visual imaginations of Britain and New Zealand, examining its changing representation over the past two hundred years. While most literary scholars will immediately think of the Egdon Heath landscape in Thomas Hardy’s 1878 novel The Return of the Native, gorse (often under its more popular Victorian name, furze) finds its way into a wide variety of works and landscapes. More importantly, its meanings go far beyond the desolate landscapes of Hardy’s imagination. My argument traces gorse’s arrival from the old world to the new, mapping its unanticipated, rapid spread across the New Zealand landscape, and its transformation from a useful boundary-marker to overgrown invader.