Etruscan honeysuckle
Lonicera etrusca
Family · Caprifoliaceae · 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 honeysuckle of sun and limestone, with long trumpet flowers turning from cream to toasted yellow through the day and scenting strongly at dusk. The red berries are not eaten.
Scrubland · Oak woods · Uplands
Also known asEtruscan woodbine
How to tell it
A woody climber with opposite leaves, bluish beneath, the last two or three pairs fused to each other forming a plate around the stem. The flowers rise in threes on a long stalk above that plate. A two-lipped, very long corolla, cream to yellowish.
What it is confused with
Mediterranean honeysuckle
Lonicera implexa
Very alike and from the same scrub. On the Mediterranean one the flowers sit directly on the plate of fused leaves; on the Etruscan there is a clear stalk raising the flowers above the plate. Both species' berries stay on the plant.
What it is for
None
Sucking nectar from the flower is an old childhood habit and that is not what harms, but the red berries cause vomiting and diarrhoea, and no European honeysuckle bears edible fruit.
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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