Mallow-leaved stork's-bill
Erodium malacoides
Family · Geraniaceae · Harmless
The broad-leaved stork's-bill, told from the common one by not having a feathery leaf: here the leaf is entire and lobed, like a small mallow's. It fills southern fields and verges in winter.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside · Dunes and sand
Also known assoft stork's-bill
How to tell it
Oval leaves with shallow lobes and a toothed margin, covered in soft hairs, nothing like the divided leaves of the other stork's-bills. Lilac-pink five-petalled flowers. A long beaked fruit that coils like a corkscrew on drying, as throughout the genus.
What it is confused with
Common stork's-bill
Erodium cicutarium
The leaf decides: feathery and much divided on the common one, entire and mallow-lobed here. The fruit is the same on both.
Open sheet →What it is for
Fodder, and young leaves eaten in some regions. The self-burying fruit is the same mechanism as the common stork's-bill's, and it is worth putting one on the ground and wetting it to watch it happen.