Narrow-leaved rue
Ruta angustifolia
Family · Rutaceae · 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 blue-green, strongly and unpleasantly scented plant that half the Peninsula keeps by the door to ward off the evil eye. It is also one of the plants causing the most severe skin burns in the Iberian flora, and almost nobody knows.
Walls and rocks · Scrubland · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside
Also known asEgyptian rue
How to tell it
Leaves divided into oval blue-green segments, waxy-looking and covered in translucent dots that are oil glands. Yellow flowers with four or five fringed petals. A strong, bitter, persistent smell that stays on the hands.
What it is confused with
Toothpick weed
Visnaga daucoides
They do not look alike, but they share the same danger and it is worth knowing they travel together: both carry furanocoumarins and both burn in sunlight. Rue is blue-green, fleshy-leaved and strong-smelling; toothpick weed is green and makes a white umbel.
Open sheet →What it is for
A warning that is the reason this sheet exists: the sap contains furanocoumarins and, with sun exposure, causes severe phytophotodermatitis, with blisters and dark marks lasting months. Pruning rue in summer sun without gloves is how people get the burns that end up in emergency rooms. It is also abortifacient and toxic if swallowed, despite traditional use in liqueurs and folk medicine.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.