Almond tree
Prunus amygdalus
Family · Rosaceae · 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.
The tree that flowers in January, when nothing else is in bloom, filling whole inland slopes with white and pink. Many found on abandoned land are wild, and those almonds are bitter and dangerous.
Fields and pasture · Scrubland · Roadsides and waste ground · Uplands
Also known assweet almond
How to tell it
White or pale pink five-petalled flowers, solitary or in pairs, always before the leaves. Narrow, long, finely toothed leaves with two glands on the stalk. The fruit is a flattened drupe covered in grey-green velvet, splitting as it dries to release the wrinkled stone.
What it is confused with
Bitter almond
Prunus dulcis var. amara
They are not told apart by the tree, the flower or the fruit: they are the same species. The only difference is in the seed's taste, and tasting is precisely the risk. Rule of thumb: an almond picked from a tree of unknown origin is not eaten, and a single almond that tastes bitter is spat out at once and no other from that tree is tried.
What it is for
Sweet almond is eaten and is one of the Peninsula's great crops. Bitter almond is not: it holds amygdalin, which releases cyanide in the stomach, and twenty to thirty bitter almonds are enough to kill an adult, far fewer a child. A wild tree on abandoned land may be either type and there is no way to know without tasting, which is exactly what must not be done.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.