Spanish vetchling
Lathyrus clymenum
Family · Fabaceae · 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.
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.