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.
Emergency
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.
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.
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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