Going out to pick wild vegetables? Don't pick this, it's highly poisonous!

In the season of rebirth, I heard that everyone wants to pick fresh wild vegetables? However, some wild vegetables are not recommended to be picked randomly. Once picked and eaten by mistake, it may be life-threatening. For example, water celery is very easy to be confused with its poisonous relatives.

Qingpin Spring Stream - Water Celery

Water celery (Oenanthe javanica), Apiaceae (Apiaceae), is a perennial aquatic or wetland herb whose stems and leaves can be used as vegetables.

Water celery has a fresh taste, is easy to collect and simple to process. You can find it by the banks of springs, ponds, streams, rivers and lakes. Useful Tropical Plants

Although it tastes good and is easy to prepare, water celery is not recommended for easy consumption. The reason is that it is poisonous. Water celery itself is not poisonous, but its origin is unlucky. Water celery belongs to the large family of Umbelliferae, and most species of flowers are composed of many small five-petal flowers forming many small umbrellas, which in turn form a large umbrella-shaped compound umbel.

Small, umbel-shaped flowers form a compound umbel｜flowers.la.coocan.jp

With this distinctive family emblem, even students who are new to plant classification can easily name their families. However, the differences within the family are very small. The Umbelliferae family gave birth to water celery, as well as poisonous weeds such as Conium maculatum and Cnidium monnieri, which are at the level of local pesticides. In particular, poisonous hemlock, which contains the highly toxic substance "coniine", is basically the same as water celery in both appearance and growth environment. Therefore, incidents of poisoning and even death due to accidental ingestion of poisonous weeds in the Umbelliferae family occur frequently every year.

Do the poison hemlock on the right and the water celery on the left look alike? Not only in appearance, but also in their growing environment. The highly toxic poison hemlock also lives by the water. | Qin Long

Of course, compared to poisonous weeds, the Umbelliferae are more famous for their edible things. Cumin and coriander are both heavyweight condiments, while fennel not only serves as a condiment but also helps celery and carrots carve out a niche in the market. In addition, there are wild vegetables that are difficult to identify, such as duck celery, bean vegetable, and short-haired angelica, as well as countless famous medicinal plants such as Angelica sp., Bupleurum sp., and Ligusticum sp.

These wild vegetables in the Umbelliferae family are not easy to identify. From left to right: Sanicula orthacantha, Cryptotaenia japonica, Heracleum moellendorffii | Qin Long, Ivy Chen

Although it is difficult to identify the genus of the Umbelliferae family, I will still try to provide you with a reference for the difference between water celery and poison hemlock. When you are 70% to 80% sure, you can go to the waterside to pick up a plant and look at its roots. If the root stem is clearly divided into sections and each section has fibrous roots, it is a plant of the genus water celery; and if there is no section or the sections are crowded together, and often have fleshy rootlets, it is poison hemlock. In this way, even if you can't remember the terms such as leaf shape, inflorescence, and double hanging fruit, you can still make a rough distinction.

However, a safer approach is to buy water celery at the vegetable market.

The poison hemlock in the picture above must not be eaten | National Gardening Association

Picking Wild Peas on Nanshan Mountain

Another wild vegetable to be careful of is Vicia cracca, a perennial climbing or scrambling herb of the Fabaceae family. Its young leaves are edible as a vegetable.

Go outing and pick wild vegetables, make sure you check it out｜luirig.altervista.org

"Gathering vetch, gathering vetch, the vetch is soft and tender. Saying 'go home', my worries are gone." In the rhythmic repetition of "Gathering vetch", have you ever imagined what kind of fresh and lovely flower this "vetch" is? Here, botany may disappoint you. The academic name "wild pea" has no aesthetic appeal, but the clusters of purple flowers and the few tendrils on the tips of the leaves are both identification features and delicate.

You can recognize wild peas by the clusters of purple flowers and the few tendrils on the tips of the leaves｜Sannse / wikipedia

The vegetable lineage of wild peas should be in the word "bean". Soybeans, mung beans, broad beans, sword beans, pigeon peas...even peanuts underground, who hasn't seen three or five kinds of beans in dishes? Because of this close relationship, the family of wild peas is naturally named after beans, called Leguminosae. Speaking of this bean family, it is really a more troublesome family, because they all have a special type of fruit - pods, and the bean family was once regarded as a whole.

Wild pea pods | minnesotawildflowers.info

However, as research deepened, some botanists believed that the differences between the three major subfamilies in the Leguminosae family - Mimosinoideae, Caesalpinioideae and Fabaceae - were large enough to be independent families. In this way, the wild pea of ​​the Leguminosae family was transformed into the wild pea of ​​the Fabaceae family, and the family emblem was changed from pods to "butterfly-shaped flowers". This family emblem, which consists of a flag petal, two wing petals and two keel petals overlapping from top to bottom, is highly recognizable, and I believe that anyone who has seen it will not make a mistake.

Example of Papilionaceae structure｜anbg.gov.au

But in later research, the genealogists began to feel that compared with the differences between other families, the Douzi family's own affairs were not a big deal. So guess what? They merged the three families back into the Dou family.

Thermopsis barbata, also known as purple-flowered yellow cassia, is a Fabaceae family flower. Its petals are layered from top to bottom, which is not the case with the neighboring Mimosinoideae or Caesalpiniae subfamily. Thermopsis barbata

However, even if the three subfamilies of the Leguminosae family were separated, the Fabaceae subfamily, to which the Vetch family belongs, still accounts for two-thirds of the total number of species in the Leguminosae family, making it still one of the five major families of angiosperms after the separation. And many famous people in the Leguminosae family are almost all from this lineage: ornamental trees such as Erythrina sp., fodder grass such as Trifolium sp., medicinal materials such as "king of all medicines" licorice (Glycyrrhiza uralensis), and wood such as "gold among woods" known as "huanghuali", and there are too many to mention in all walks of life.

Erythrina crestii can be used for urban greening｜Frank Vincentz / wikimedia commons

Speaking of food, the bean family also includes Sophora japonica and Robinia pseudoacacia whose flowers can be eaten, and Kudzu vine and Apios fortunei whose roots can be eaten. In addition, there is the mountain pea that climbs with wild peas, and alfalfa and cornus officinalis that are often used as fodder.

There are many famous plants in the bean family, some of which can be eaten and some used as feed. 1. Lathyrus davidii 2. Kummerowia stipulacea 3. Medicago sativa 4. Pueraria lobata 5. Robinia pseudoacacia｜Qin Long; straybird726

The bean family, with its large lineup, can be found in various environments from urban green spaces to arid deserts, but the wild pea family, as described in "Grass Insects", prefers mountains and forests that are not too far from people. One of my seniors once ate cold wild pea sprouts in a restaurant in the mountains of the imperial capital. After being blanched and fully soaked, the remaining light grass fragrance is suitable for various seasonings.

The reason why they must be cooked thoroughly is that wild peas and many other species of the legume family contain toxic substances such as cyanoalanine, which must be changed by high temperatures to lose their toxicity. The content of toxic substances in flowering plants is higher.

The two main characters introduced this time, celery and celery, have fresh and pleasant names, but they are both deeply entangled with the word "poison". Therefore, I emphasize again that you must try wild vegetables under the guidance of professionals, otherwise uncooked wild peas and poison hemlock disguised as water celery will teach your self-righteous little freshness a lesson.

Author: Qin Long

This article comes from the Species Calendar, welcome to forward

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