Baetic milkvetch
Erophaca baetica
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.
The sturdy legume with cream flowers in dense racemes and pods inflated like paper balloons, appearing on dehesa edges and southern banks.
Scrubland · Montado · Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture
Also known asfalse liquorice vetch
How to tell it
A large bushy plant to a metre and a half, with compound leaves of nine to fifteen large oval leaflets, pale green. Dense upright racemes of cream or pale yellow flowers. The pods are the mark: inflated, papery, four to six centimetres, popping when squeezed and rattling with loose seeds inside.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None. The seeds look like chickpeas and are not: they contain toxic alkaloids and cause livestock poisonings, which explains the folk names in every country where it grows. A seed that looks like food and is not earns the entry for that reason alone.