Taro
Colocasia esculenta
Family · Araceae · 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
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The plant with enormous heart-shaped leaves filling the streams of the Azores and Madeira. The tuber is traditional food once thoroughly cooked, and is violently irritant raw.
Streams and ditches · Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known aselephant ear, dasheen
How to tell it
Enormous leaves, thirty to sixty centimetres, heart or shield-shaped, with the stalk attached inside the blade rather than at the margin, which is the genus's mark. Dull green, with water running off in round beads. A typical aroid inflorescence, a yellowish finger inside a pale green spathe. Thick rhizomes and tubers.
What it is confused with
Italian arum
Arum italicum
They are in the same family and share the piercing crystals. Italian arum is far smaller, with pale-veined leaves and the stalk attached at the blade margin; taro has giant leaves with the stalk attached in the middle. Italian arum is not eaten at all.
What it is for
The tuber is traditional food in the Azores and Madeira, boiled for a long time, and the young leaves are also eaten cooked. Raw it is another matter: like all aroids it holds needle-shaped calcium oxalate crystals that pierce mucous membranes, and one bite of raw taro closes the throat. It is never tasted raw, and the cooking is not optional.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
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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