Sea squill
Drimia maritima
Family · Asparagaceae · 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 metre-and-a-half white wand that rises from bare ground in September, without a leaf around it, and is one of the strangest apparitions in the southern landscape. Beneath it sits a bulb the size of a football, and it is rat poison.
Dunes and sand · Scrubland · Montado · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known assquill, sea onion
How to tell it
In late summer: a tall bare stalk with dozens of white flowers in a spike, with no leaves at all, which almost nothing else does. In winter: a huge rosette of broad fleshy leaves, with no flower. The two phases never overlap, which is why many people think they are different plants.
What it is confused with
Autumn crocus
Colchicum autumnale
They share the odd habit of flowering in autumn without leaves, and both are deadly. Sea squill is tall, with dozens of white flowers in a spike; autumn crocus is low, with a solitary lilac flower. Neither is picked.
Open sheet →What it is for
None at home. The bulb contains cardiac glycosides and scilliroside, and was for centuries the reference rat poison across the Mediterranean. Handling the bulb, the sap causes strong dermatitis, so do not cut or dig it up out of curiosity.