Narrow-leaved lupin
Lupinus angustifolius
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 wild lupin with violet-blue flowers in a spike and leaves in a whorl like a fan of thin fingers. It bears seeds identical to the snack lupin's, and those are not eaten.
Fields and pasture · Roadsides and waste ground · Pine woods · Scrubland
Also known asblue lupin, wild lupin
How to tell it
Palmate leaves with five to nine very narrow leaflets set in a whorl from one point, like the spokes of a wheel. A loose spike of violet-blue or lilac flowers. Hairy flat pods with three to seven smooth seeds mottled brown and white.
What it is confused with
White lupin
Lupinus albus
The cultivated lupin has white or pale blue flowers and broad leaflets; the wild one has violet-blue flowers and very narrow leaflets. But even the cultivated one, picked in the field, may be a bitter variety: the lupin you eat comes soaked and salted, not out of the pod.
What it is for
None
The seeds contain quinolizidine alkaloids, chiefly lupanine, and are bitter and toxic: they cause dry mouth, blurred vision, fast heartbeat and confusion. The snack lupin is the same family but a sweet variety, and even that takes days of soaking in salted water. A lupin seed picked in the field is never eaten.
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
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
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.