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.
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.
Open sheet →What it is for
None. Historically a plant of executions and old pharmacopoeia, which is context and not an invitation.