Spanish vetchling
Lathyrus clymenum
Family · Fabaceae · 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 climbing vetchling with large two-coloured flowers, a reddish purple standard and violet-blue wings, climbing through scrub with tendrils and carrying a winged stem.
Fields and pasture · Scrubland · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside
Also known ascrimson pea, climbing vetchling
How to tell it
A stem with two green wings running its whole length, felt at once between the fingers. Leaves with few pairs of leaflets and a branched tendril at the tip. The lower leaves have broad leaflets, the upper ones narrow like ribbons. Flowers two to three centimetres, two-coloured, one to three per stalk.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None to encourage
The genus contains oxalyl-diaminopropionic acid, the compound that causes lathyrism: an irreversible paralysis of the legs from prolonged consumption of grass pea. There were epidemics in Spain and Portugal in famine years. Wild seeds are not eaten.
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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