White ramping fumitory
Fumaria capreolata
Family · Papaveraceae · Poisonous
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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 climber with bluish, finely divided leaves covering walls and hedges in winter, with racemes of white or cream flowers tipped dark red, like small rabbits.
Town and roadside · Walls and rocks · Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known asramping fumitory
How to tell it
It climbs by gripping with its leaf stalks, which coil like tendrils. Blue-green leaves divided several times into small flat segments. Dense racemes of twelve to twenty white or cream flowers, a centimetre long, tipped dark red or purple. After fertilisation the flowers turn downward.
What it is confused with
Common fumitory
Fumaria officinalis
Colour decides: purple-pink on common fumitory, white or cream with a dark tip on the ramping one. And only the ramping one grips with its leaf stalks and climbs over hedges. Both carry the same alkaloids.
What it is for
Traditional medicinal use as an infusion for liver and skin, shared by the whole genus. It is not a harmless plant: it contains isoquinoline alkaloids that in high dose cause low blood pressure, arrhythmia and drowsiness, and the margin between the traditional and the toxic dose is narrow.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.
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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