Alexanders
Smyrnium olusatrum
Family · Apiaceae · Poisonous
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 large glossy green umbellifer that fills coastal verges and walls in February, with yellow-green umbels and a strong celery smell. It was eaten for fifteen hundred years, and it is an umbellifer.
Roadsides and waste ground · Walls and rocks · Town and roadside · Streams and ditches
Also known ashorse parsley, black lovage
How to tell it
A sturdy plant to a metre and a half, bright glossy green. A thick grooved stem, hollow in old specimens. Leaves divided into three groups of three broad, glossy, toothed leaflets, with large sheaths clasping the stem. Yellow-green umbels. Black round fruits when ripe, which is the genus's mark.
What it is confused with
Hemlock
Conium maculatum
They grow side by side on the same verge and both are large umbellifers. Hemlock has a smooth stem with purple blotches, finely divided leaves like giant parsley, and smells of mouse urine when crushed; alexanders has broad glossy leaflets and smells of celery. When in doubt, neither.
Open sheet →What it is for
It was a common vegetable from Roman times to the Middle Ages, stems and root boiled, and fell out of use when cultivated celery arrived. This guide does not recommend it: it is an umbellifer, and the family rule does not change because this one is good. An umbellifer picked by mistake in Portugal may be hemlock water dropwort or hemlock, and both kill.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.