Birthwort
Aristolochia paucinervis
Family · Aristolochiaceae · Can kill
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 plant with brownish yellow pipe-shaped flowers, curved and foul smelling, growing in damp shade. The whole family is carcinogenic and nephrotoxic, with no known exception.
Streams and ditches · Oak woods · Scrubland · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known asfew-veined birthwort
How to tell it
Prostrate or climbing stems with heart or kidney-shaped leaves on long stalks. The flowers are unmistakable: a tube curved like a pipe, brownish yellow or greenish, with a dark lip at the opening that traps insects inside for a night. Fruits in a hanging capsule like a small lantern.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None, and it matters to say why. It was a classical medicinal plant for two thousand years, used in childbirth, and is today banned in the European Union: aristolochic acid causes irreversible kidney failure and urinary tract cancer. A mass poisoning in the Balkans and another in Belgium confirmed it. There is no safe dose.