Foxglove
Digitalis purpurea
Family · Plantaginaceae · 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
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The tower of pink bells of the northern sierras, pretty enough to invite picking, and able to stop a heart. The whole plant is toxic, including the water in the vase it stood in.
Uplands · Oak woods · Roadsides and waste ground · Scrubland
Also known asfoxglove, lady's glove
How to tell it
A tall spike with tubular flowers hanging on one side only, purplish pink and spotted dark inside. In its first year it is only a rosette of large soft leaves at ground level, and that is when it is dangerous, because it looks like nothing.
What it is confused with
Comfrey
Symphytum officinale
The confusion happens at the leaf rosette, before flowering, and has caused serious poisonings among people gathering comfrey for tea. Without the flower, do not pick.
What it is for
None outside a pharmacy
The cardiac glycosides once extracted from it are exact-dose medicine made in a laboratory. At home, the same molecule is poison.
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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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.