Hydrangea
Hydrangea macrophylla
Family · Hydrangeaceae · 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 flower everyone associates with the Azores and which came from Japan. It lines the roads and pasture divisions of every island, and it is toxic, which almost nobody knows.
Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture · Streams and ditches · Town and roadside
Also known asbigleaf hydrangea, French hydrangea
How to tell it
A shrub one to two metres, with large opposite leaves, oval, fleshy and serrated. A dense ball inflorescence ten to twenty centimetres, blue, pink or white, made almost entirely of sterile flowers with four broad petals. The colour depends on the soil: blue on acid soil, pink on alkaline.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None. The leaves and buds contain cyanogenic glycosides and cause vomiting, abdominal pain and dizziness, with recorded poisonings from mistaking leaves for a vegetable or using the flowers to decorate plates. It was planted as a living hedge to divide pastures, and is today the Azores' signature image despite not being from there.