Purple viper's bugloss
Echium plantagineum
Family · Boraginaceae · 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.
Emergency
The purple that paints Alentejo fields in April and yields one of the country's best honeys. Beautiful, valuable to bees, and toxic to the liver of anything that eats it regularly, livestock included.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Montado
Also known asPaterson's curse, salvation Jane
How to tell it
Funnel flowers, purple-blue, lined along a curved stem like a scorpion's tail. The whole plant is rough and bristly. Large basal leaves in a rosette.
What it is confused with
Borage
Borago officinalis
Both blue and hairy, and from the same family. Borage has downward-facing star flowers; viper's bugloss has funnel flowers along a curved stem.
What it is for
None as food
It is an excellent nectar plant and the honey is safe, because the alkaloids do not pass across in meaningful amounts. The plant itself is not eaten, nor grazed continuously by animals.
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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Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.