Herbariuma Backpackers project
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Nice spurge

Euphorbia nicaeensis

Family · Euphorbiaceae · Poisonous

ToxicIrritant

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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
Nice spurge (Euphorbia nicaeensis)Nice spurge (Euphorbia nicaeensis)
Robert Flogaus-Faust, CC BY 4.0 · Stan Shebs, CC BY-SA 3.0

The blue-grey spurge of limestone, with reddish stems at the base and a cap of yellow-green leaves at the top. White latex from any cut, as in the whole family.

Where it grows

Uplands · Scrubland · Roadsides and waste ground · Fields and pasture

Also known as

Riviera spurge

In flower

How to tell it

A sturdy plant thirty to eighty centimetres, with many stems from a woody base, reddish below. Blue-grey leaves, elongated and broadest near the tip, densely set along the stem. At the top, a whorl of broader leaves beneath the yellow-green inflorescence, with crescent-shaped glands.

What it is confused with

No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.

What it is for

None

The family rule applies without exceptions: white latex, hands away from the face, and none of it goes in the mouth. Spurge latex burns skin and causes serious corneal injury.

Where it occurs

Iberian Peninsula

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

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