Andalusian birthwort

Aristolochia baetica

Family · Aristolochiaceae · Can kill

Toxic

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.

Andalusian birthwort (Aristolochia baetica) — Daniel Capilla, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz, CC BY-SA 4.0

The evergreen bluish-leaved climber of the southern Peninsula, with purplish brown pipe flowers opening in winter. Same warning as its cousin: aristolochic acid, no safe dose.

Where it grows

Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Oak woods · Streams and ditches

Also known as

Baetic birthwort

In flower

How to tell it

A climber woody at the base, with evergreen broad heart-shaped leaves, bluish and leathery, on long stalks. Flowers in a curved tube of dark brown or wine colour, with a dark velvety opening. It flowers in winter, when almost nothing else does in southern scrub. Hanging capsules opening like a lantern.

What it is confused with

No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.

What it is for

None. Ecologically it matters: it is the plant the caterpillars of the butterfly Zerynthia rumina depend on, feeding on nothing else. Seeing that butterfly in Algarve scrub means the birthwort is nearby.

Sources

Flora-On