One-leaved squill
Scilla monophyllos
Family · Asparagaceae · 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 squill recognised without hesitation by one thing alone: it has a single broad leaf per plant, which no other blue spring flower in Portugal does.
Scrubland · Pine woods · Fields and pasture · Oak woods
Also known assingle-leaf squill
How to tell it
A single basal leaf, broad and strap-shaped, often appearing before the flower and persisting after it. A stem ten to thirty centimetres with a loose raceme of five to twenty lilac-blue flowers of six narrow segments spread in a star, with blue anthers. It grows from a small bulb. Endemic to the western Peninsula.
What it is confused with
Spanish bluebell
Hyacinthoides hispanica
Count the leaves: only one on the squill, several on the bluebell. And bluebell flowers are hanging bells, squill flowers are open stars. Both bulbs are toxic.
Open sheet →What it is for
None. The genus contains cardioactive glycosides and saponins, and the bulb is toxic. It is another case where a small bulb with no garlic smell is not garlic, and does not go in the mouth.