Hemlock DEADLY 

 Poison hemlock  (conium maculatum)

This plant is deadly, it’s really not one to mess with. If you eat this plant, there is no cure for the poisoning and it’s a pretty nasty way to go. Socrates eight this plant as his method of execution so that his students would be able to study his death and the symptoms he experienced.

It is a beautiful plant, and once you know what you’re looking for, it can be easily differentiated from things like cow parsley and sweet cicely that are also in the carrot family. 

What makes this plant so poisonous is the alkaloids it contains and what those alkaloids do is as follows, they cause burning digestive tract, increased salivation, vomiting and diarrhoea, muscle weakness and paralysis. It also damages your liver and affects your bladder muscles, making it hard to go to the toilet at the biggie is its ability to stop your brain sending messages to your heart and lungs so you either die from heart attack or suffocation.

When you’re identifying hemlock and cow parsley, the most important part to look at is the stem below the leaves

Identifying features for poison hemlock

• frond or featherlike leaves they are called tripinnate because they branch three times

• The leaf shape overall is triangular having wider leaf branches at the bottom and narrow ones at the top of the main leaf stem

• The leaf stem is rounded hollow and has purple spots which become more prominent with age

• When the plant goes into flower The flowering stem can reach up to around 2 m tall and remains quite leafy.

• Flower, some selves, or white and green clusters of straight stems. It is an umbellifer so if you turn the flower head upside down, it looks like an uptown umbrella

• The flowers have five petals one is usually larger than the other four like a child drawing of a flower

• The seeds are small, rounded ball shaped with grooves.

• If you break the stem, it has a very musty, chemically, unpleasant smell

If you have all of these features, it’s likely you have poison hemlock DO NOT EAT IT!

Lookalikes of poison hemlock

Cow parsley

Sweet cicely

Pignut