Common mallow
Malva sylvestris
Family · Malvaceae · Harmless
The purple flower with dark stripes that turns up on any village verge. The round green fruits, which children call little cheeses, are the easiest tell.
Roadsides and waste ground · Town and roadside · Fields and pasture · Walls and rocks
Also known ashigh mallow, cheeses
How to tell it
Five-petalled pinkish-purple flowers with strong dark veins. Rounded lobed leaves, rough to the touch. The fruit is a green disc divided into segments, like a small cheese.
What it is confused with
Tree mallow
Malva arborea
Tree mallow is much bigger, almost a shrub, and lives near the sea. Both are harmless mallows; the difference is size and place.
What it is for
Tender leaves cooked in soups across the Peninsula, and the flowers taken as a soothing infusion in folk medicine. The green fruits were a country child's snack.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
With documented traditional uses. Not a therapeutic indication and not a dose.
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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