Azores spurge
Euphorbia azorica
Family · Euphorbiaceae · 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
_2.jpg){kind=link}
The spurge endemic to the Azores, growing on sea cliffs and lava flows, with the same white latex and the same warning as the whole family.
Dunes and sand · Scrubland · Uplands
Also known asAzorean spurge
How to tell it
An upright plant with a woody base, to a metre, with reddish stems. Elongated fleshy leaves clustered at the top. Yellow-green cup inflorescences with crescent glands, as in other spurges. White latex from any cut. Range: endemic to the Azores.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None
The latex burns skin and causes serious corneal injury, as in the whole family. A rule with no exceptions: white sap, hands away from the face.
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.