Tassel hyacinth
Muscari comosum
Family · Asparagaceae · Irritating
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.
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The wild hyacinth with an odd spike, brown flowers below and a tassel of sterile purple flowers on top, like a brush. In Italy and southern Spain the bulb is a market delicacy.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Montado · Scrubland
Also known astassel grape hyacinth
How to tell it
The bright purple tassel on top, made of flowers that never set seed, is unmistakable and exists in no other native hyacinth. Below it, greenish brown flowers on horizontal stalks. Long channelled leaves rising from the bulb.
What it is confused with
Wild leek
Allium ampeloprasum
Both are field bulbs that get gathered, and this is where the garlic rule saves you: smell it. Wild leek smells strongly of garlic; tassel hyacinth smells of nothing. More important still, autumn crocus also smells of nothing and kills, so a scentless bulb is only gathered with the flower in sight.
Open sheet →What it is for
The bulb is eaten, and it is the lampascioni of Puglian cooking and the bitter onions of southern Spain. A note that is the important part of the sheet: it is very bitter and is only eaten after repeated soaking or long cooking, and even then in moderate quantity. Not a bulb to taste raw.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.