Fool's watercress
Apium nodiflorum
Family · Apiaceae · Irritating
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.
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The creeping umbellifer that carpets ditches and clean streams, bright green and parsley-like. The English name says it all: it is fool's watercress, because anyone gathering it to eat risks taking hemlock water-dropwort home in the bunch.
Streams and ditches · Fields and pasture
Also known asfool's cress
How to tell it
Creeping or sprawling, with hollow stems that root at the nodes. Leaves divided into a row of oval, evenly toothed, glossy green leaflets. Small white umbels emerging opposite the leaves, on almost no stalk.
What it is confused with
Hemlock water-dropwort
Oenanthe crocata
They grow side by side. Fool's watercress creeps at ankle height; hemlock water-dropwort is robust and stands above the knee, with a bunch of yellowish finger-roots and sap that darkens in air. When in doubt, and there is always doubt, do not gather.
Open sheet →What it is for
It was traditionally eaten in salad in some regions, and that is exactly why it is here without the edible tag: it shares the ditch with hemlock water-dropwort, which kills, and with watercress, which is eaten. A plant whose identification depends on getting three lookalikes right is not a plant to gather.