Darnel
Lolium temulentum
Family · Poaceae · 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 cereal-field grass that gave us the phrase about separating the wheat from the tares. It became rare once seed was cleaned, but it still turns up in cereal fields and verges, and it is still the only grass in the Peninsula that intoxicates whoever eats it.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known aspoison darnel, tares
How to tell it
A flattened spike, with spikelets pressed edgewise to the axis in two alternating rows, like ryegrass. What sets it apart: each spikelet carries a long, stiff AWN, a bristle clearly visible against the light, and the lower glume is long, reaching almost to the tip of the spikelet. Common ryegrass has no awn, or a very short one, and its glume falls well short of the spikelet.
What it is confused with
Perennial ryegrass
Lolium perenne
No awns, or very short ones, and the lower glume clearly shorter than the spikelet. It is the grass of lawns and pastures, and it is not toxic.
What it is for
None, and that is the point. The toxicity is not the plant's own: it comes from a fungus living inside the seed that produces alkaloids causing dizziness, blurred vision, tremors and vomiting. This is why grain was cleaned by hand before milling for centuries.
Where it occurs
Sources
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