African lily
Agapanthus praecox
Family · Amaryllidaceae · Poisonous
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
Emergency
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The blue balls that line the roads of Madeira and the Azores in summer. They came from South Africa, were planted everywhere to hold banks, and they are toxic.
Roadsides and waste ground · Walls and rocks · Town and roadside · Fields and pasture
Also known aslily of the Nile, blue lily
How to tell it
A dense clump of strap leaves, broad, fleshy and arching, dark green, all rising from the base. A bare sturdy stem to a metre, with a spherical umbel of twenty to a hundred trumpet flowers, pale blue to violet, or white. Thick fleshy roots on a rhizome.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None
The whole plant contains saponins: the sap causes dermatitis and mouth burns, and the rhizome is the most toxic part. There are poisonings from mistaking the fleshy rhizome for an edible bulb. It spreads by seed and by rhizome and takes over whole banks where nothing else comes back.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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