Andalusian birthwort
Aristolochia baetica
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.
Emergency
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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.
Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Oak woods · Streams and ditches
Also known asBaetic birthwort
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.
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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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.