Annual scorpion vetch
Coronilla scorpioides
Family · Fabaceae · 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 annual legume with bluish fleshy leaves clasping the stem, small posies of yellow flowers and curved, jointed pods like a scorpion's tail.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Scrubland · Town and roadside
Also known asscorpion senna
How to tell it
Leaves of three leaflets, but the middle one is much larger and round and the two side ones small, all bluish and hairless, the leaf looking pierced by the stem. Yellow flowers in groups of two to five on a long stalk. Slender curved pods divided into segments that break into pieces.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None
The genus contains cardiotoxic glycosides of the foxglove type, and several species have poisoned livestock. A pretty roadside legume is neither forage nor a snack.
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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