Columbine
Aquilegia vulgaris
Family · Ranunculaceae · 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
-20220508-RM-112027.jpg){kind=link}
The violet-blue flower with five spurs curved like claws, looking like a group of doves with their beaks together, and among the most improbable flowers of a mountain wood.
Oak woods · Uplands · Streams and ditches
Also known asgranny's bonnet, European crowfoot
How to tell it
An upright plant to a metre. Leaves divided into three groups of three leaflets with rounded lobes, bluish beneath. Nodding flowers three to five centimetres, violet-blue or purple, with five petals extended backwards into curved spurs swollen at the tip, which is what makes it unmistakable. Fruits in five upright follicles.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None
Like all buttercup relatives it contains protoanemonin, and the seeds also hold cyanogenic glycosides: there are recorded cases of severe poisoning in children who ate them. It is a flower to look at, and among the loveliest found in a mountain valley in June.
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
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.