Fragrant clematis
Clematis flammula
Family · Ranunculaceae · 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 climber that fills southern hedges with a jasmine scent in August, and whose perfume misleads anyone who does not know: the sap burns skin just as effectively as its northern cousin's.
Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Roadsides and waste ground · Montado
Also known assweet-scented virgin's bower
How to tell it
Twice-divided leaves with small narrow leaflets, dark green. Clouds of small white flowers with four tepals and many stamens, strongly and sweetly scented. Silky plumes in autumn.
What it is confused with
Old man's beard
Clematis vitalba
Smell and leaflet: this smells of jasmine and has small twice-divided leaflets; old man's beard barely smells and has five larger leaflets. Neither is handled without need.
What it is for
None
Same protoanemonin, same blisters. The Spanish name muermera comes from an old veterinary use that consisted precisely of making sores on animals.
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
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
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.