Weasel's snout
Misopates orontium
Family · Plantaginaceae · Harmless
The wild snapdragon of cornfields, with small pink flowers that open if you squeeze them sideways, exactly like the garden one. Same game, smaller scale.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside · Pine woods
Also known aslesser snapdragon, calf's snout
How to tell it
Reddish pink flowers closed into a snout, with a pouch beneath, held against the stem along the upper part. Narrow alternate leaves. The fruit is a capsule opening in two holes and really does look like a small animal's skull.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
No use
It is worth it for the capsule, one of the most curious fruits to show someone on a late-summer trail.
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.