Toothpick weed
Visnaga daucoides
Family · Apiaceae · Irritating
The umbellifer whose umbel, on drying, closes and hardens into a rigid nest of woody rays. Each ray is a toothpick, and that is literally where half of Europe's toothpicks came from.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside
Also known askhella, bishop's weed
How to tell it
A dense, very round white umbel with dozens of thick rays. On drying it folds inward into a hard nest recognisable from metres away. Leaves divided into fine stiff segments, blue-green.
What it is confused with
Wild carrot
Daucus carota
Both close the umbel into a nest on drying. The toothpick weed's turns hard and woody, with rays thick as toothpicks; wild carrot's stays light and fragile. And wild carrot has a hairy stem, this one does not.
Open sheet →What it is for
Toothpicks, the use that named the plant in several languages. It was also an important medicinal plant in Egypt and the Mediterranean. A note that stays on the sheet: it contains furanocoumarins, and contact with the sap followed by sunlight burns the skin, as with fig.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.