Madeira carrot
Daucus decipiens
Family · Apiaceae · Poisonous
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.
Emergency
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The wild carrot of Madeiran cliffs, which makes a woody stem and a large white umbel. It is an umbellifer, and that alone is reason not to touch it with any intention of gathering.
Walls and rocks · Dunes and sand · Scrubland
Also known asMadeiran wild carrot
How to tell it
A sturdy plant with a woody base, to a metre and a half. Leaves divided several times into fine, slightly fleshy segments, pale green. Large flat umbels of white flowers, with divided bracts beneath, as in nearly every wild carrot. Fruits covered in hooked spines. Range: endemic to Madeira.
What it is confused with
Hemlock
Conium maculatum
Both are large white-flowered umbellifers. Hemlock has a smooth stem with purple blotches and smells of mouse urine when crushed; Madeira carrot has a woody base, slightly fleshy leaves and a carrot smell. When in doubt, neither is gathered.
What it is for
None to recommend
The whole family's rule applies and does not change because the plant is endemic and pretty: a white-flowered umbellifer picked by mistake may be hemlock, and the consequences have no remedy. You look at it and photograph it.
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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Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.