Poison hemlock
Conium maculatum
Family · Apiaceae · 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.
Emergency
The plant that killed Socrates, growing on disturbed ground all over the Peninsula. Tall, with white umbels, and a stem that gives it away: smooth, hollow and blotched with purple.
Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture · Town and roadside · Streams and ditches
Also known ashemlock, spotted hemlock
How to tell it
The purple blotches on the smooth stem are the tell, and no other common umbellifer has them. Crushed, it smells bad, mousy. No hairs.
What it is confused with
Fennel
Foeniculum vulgare
Smell and stem. Fennel smells of aniseed with a clean stem; hemlock smells foul with a blotched stem.
What it is for
None
Historically a plant of executions and old pharmacopoeia, which is context and not an invitation.
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.