Mountain meadow saffron
Colchicum montanum
Family · Colchicaceae · 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 lilac-pink flower rising from bare ground at the end of summer, without a single leaf, announcing the end of the long afternoons. It contains colchicine and is among the most lethal plants in the Peninsula.
Uplands · Fields and pasture · Scrubland
Also known asmountain colchicum
How to tell it
Solitary or small-grouped lilac-pink flowers of six narrow segments separated nearly to the base, rising straight from the soil with no visible stem and no leaves at all. The leaves come later, in winter and spring, as dark green straps. It grows from a buried corm.
What it is confused with
Autumn crocus
Crocus serotinus
Both rise from bare ground in autumn, lilac and leafless. Count the stamens: three in true crocus, six in colchicum. And crocus has its segments joined in a long tube, colchicum has them separate nearly to the base. Neither is picked: colchicum kills and wild crocus is not worth the risk of being wrong.
What it is for
None
Colchicine has no antidote and poisoning looks like ordinary gastroenteritis in the first hours, which wastes precious time; then bone marrow, liver and kidney fail. Half the serious poisonings happen on mountain pasture, in livestock and in people mistaking the leaves for a leaf vegetable.
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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