woad-waxen

• woad waxen

woad-waxen (plural woad-waxens)

1. The leguminous plant Genista tinctoria, native to Europe.
   • 1898, Massachusetts State Board of Agriculture, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Board of Agriculture, Volume 45, Part 1897, page 273,

     The woad waxen (Genista tinctoria), common enough near Salem, is seldom found inland, and the same holds good for the barberry and privet, which grow so abundantly near the coast and which have probably been introduced for two hundred years.

   • 1941, Eva Roe Gaggin, Down Ryton Water, 1998, page 24,

     […] but after a time he left the sages, and leaped above the mayweeds, the felt-wyrts, the savouries, and the woad-waxens.

   • 1981, S. N. F. Sanford, Country Herbs, page 20,

     Woad-waxen, which in modern English is wax-weed, was one of the plants of many virtues brought by the earliest Pilgrims, […] .

• (Genista tinctoria): greenweed, greenwood, whin, wood-wash, woodwax, woodwaxen