Friar's cowl
Arisarum vulgare
Family · Araceae · Poisonous
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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
The winter plant that makes a kind of striped friar's hood, brown and white, curved over itself, at ground level. It appears with the first October rains, when almost nothing else flowers.
Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Oak woods · Town and roadside
Also known aslarus, cuckoo pint of the south
How to tell it
Arrow or heart-shaped leaves, green and glossy, on a long stalk rising straight from the ground. The inflorescence is a curved tube striped brown and whitish, with a dark tip peeping from under the hood, like a lamp handle. It grows from a tuberous rhizome.
What it is confused with
Italian arum
Arum italicum
Italian arum is much larger, with an open upright white or greenish spathe and big leaves with pale veins; friar's cowl makes a curved striped hood at ground level. Both are toxic and irritant, and neither is tasted.
What it is for
None
Like all aroids it holds needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals that pierce mucous membranes: mouth and throat swell immediately and the rhizome causes severe inflammation. It was eaten in extreme famine after repeated boiling, and that is the only reason it appears in old books.
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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