Spanish foxglove
Digitalis thapsi
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.
The foxglove of the dry interior, smaller and stickier than the common one, coming out of schist cracks and stone walls. It is as lethal as its cousin and deserves the same respect.
Uplands · Scrubland · Walls and rocks · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known asThapsus foxglove
How to tell it
A plant thirty to eighty centimetres, wholly covered in glandular hairs that make it clearly sticky to touch, which separates it from common foxglove. Elongated leaves running down the stem as wings. Thimble flowers two to three centimetres, purple-pink, dark-spotted inside, all facing one way. Iberian endemic.
What it is confused with
Foxglove
Digitalis purpurea
Both are lethal and the difference changes nothing practical: the common one is larger, greyish green and felted; this is smaller, sticky to touch and from dry rocky places. Neither is picked under any circumstances.
Open sheet →What it is for
None, and there is no room for experiments. It contains cardiotonic glycosides, the same as common foxglove: they alter heart rhythm and the gap between effect and arrest is narrow. Leaves mistaken for comfrey in infusions have killed adults in Europe. Do not pick, do not dry, do not taste.