Autumn mandrake
Mandragora autumnalis
Family · Solanaceae · Can kill
Read this before the sheet
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.
The plant of legend, which really exists and grows in fields of the southern Peninsula. A large wrinkled rosette flat on the ground, with purple winter flowers and yellow fruits that smell good and kill.
Fields and pasture · Montado · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known asmandrake
How to tell it
A rosette of large wavy leaves lying flat like an open cabbage. Purple-blue flowers in the centre, in winter. Round yellow fruits the size of a plum, sweetly scented.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None. The fruit smells of ripe apple and is behind several serious poisonings in the southern Peninsula, mostly in children and in people who mistake it for a garden plant.