White lupin
Lupinus albus
Family · Fabaceae · 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 lupin of bar snacks, grown for thousands of years in the Peninsula and sometimes escaped to verges and fields. The seed people eat comes from months of soaking in salted water: picked off the plant and tasted there, it poisons.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground
Also known aswhite lupine
How to tell it
A sturdy upright plant, up to a metre. An open-hand leaf with five to nine leaflets from the same point, silky-hairy underneath. White flowers, often tipped bluish, in an upright spike at the top of the stem. A broad flattened pod, covered in hairs, with three to six LARGE flattened white seeds. Narrow-leaved lupin has blue to violet flowers and much smaller, mottled seeds.
What it is confused with
Narrow-leaved lupin
Lupinus angustifolius
Blue to violet flowers and much narrower, almost linear leaflets. The seeds are small and mottled, not large and white. It is just as bitter raw.
What it is for
Traditionally used as food, and only after debittering. The raw seed carries bitter quinolizidine alkaloids that cause dry mouth, blurred vision, dizziness and a racing heart; the bitterness is the warning, and the old varieties are the most loaded. Debittering is days of soaking with the water changed many times, not a rinse.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
Where it occurs
Sources
Community
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