Photo: Morbus147, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

Daffodil

Narcissus species

Poisonous

Its bulb sits in the ground looking exactly like an onion and causes violent vomiting, cramps and collapse.

Educational content, not medical or professional advice. In an emergency call your local emergency number (112 in Europe) first. Never eat a wild plant or mushroom because of a website or photo.

⚠️ Suspected eating of any part needs a call to 112, the CIAV poison line in Portugal, or your own country's poison service. Do not wait for symptoms, and keep a sample or photograph.

⚠️ Do not induce vomiting unless a professional tells you to, since the plant usually causes heavy vomiting on its own and dehydration is the main risk.

⚠️ Sap causes a well-known skin problem in flower pickers, an itchy dry rash on the hands and forearms. Wear gloves and wash after handling. Sap in the eye needs flushing and medical advice.

⚠️ Store daffodil bulbs far away from onions, garlic and any food store, and label them. Most household poisonings start in the shed.

⚠️ Children and pets chew bulbs left out for planting. Dogs are frequently poisoned by digging up bulbs.

⚠️ Never plant daffodils inside a vegetable bed, a poultry run or a herb garden you cut from.

Confused with

Onion and shallot bulbs (Allium cepa)

Danger: Lycorine and related alkaloids cause burning mouth, heavy salivation, violent vomiting, cramping diarrhoea, sweating, low blood pressure and sometimes heart rhythm problems. Whole families and school kitchens have been poisoned when daffodil bulbs were stored or planted beside onions.

How to tell: Cut the bulb in half and smell it. An onion smells like an onion and stings your eyes, and its layers are concentric rings that separate cleanly. A daffodil bulb smells of nothing, and its flesh is denser with a hard flat base plate. No onion smell means it is not an onion, whatever it looks like.

Wild garlic and wild leek leaves (Allium species)

Danger: Daffodil leaves gathered among wild garlic cause the same violent vomiting, and the poisoning is often blamed on a bad meal instead of the plant.

How to tell: Smell each crushed leaf. Allium smells of garlic or onion every time. Daffodil leaves smell green and nothing more, are thicker, blue-green and blunt-ended, and come up in a bundle from one bulb.

Chives in a garden bed

Danger: Daffodil leaves pushing up through a herb bed in late winter get snipped into food.

How to tell: Chive leaves are hollow tubes, round in cross section. Daffodil leaves are flat and solid. Roll a leaf between your fingers: hollow tube means chive, flat strap means stop.

Leaves

Flat or slightly keeled strap-shaped leaves 20 to 50 cm long and 5 to 20 mm wide, blue-green or grey-green, blunt-tipped, rising in a bundle straight from the bulb with no stem. Solid, not tubular.

Flowers

One or several flowers per stalk, yellow, white or two-toned, with six spreading outer segments and a central trumpet or cup, emerging from a papery brown sheath. The bulb is a brown-skinned onion shape 3 to 6 cm across with white layered flesh.

Stem

A single hollow leafless flower stalk, round or slightly flattened, rising from the bulb.

Smell or taste

Many are sweetly scented in flower. Crucially, the bulb and leaves have no onion or garlic smell at all. Never taste any part.

Habitat

Gardens, orchards, verges, churchyards and naturalised on banks and meadows. Wild narcissus species are native in Portuguese mountains and grassland, and garden daffodils escape everywhere.

Preparation

No preparation makes it safe. Boiling, roasting and frying do not destroy the alkaloids, and cooked daffodil bulb in a stew is a recorded cause of mass poisoning. There is no way to make it food.

Traditional use

Narcissus alkaloids are studied in medicine, and galantamine, used for Alzheimer's disease, comes from snowdrop and narcissus species. That medicine is extracted, purified and dosed in a laboratory and a pharmacy. Home preparation of any kind is dangerous and pointless.

Harvest rule

Not a harvest plant. Gloves when lifting and dividing bulbs, and keep the bulbs in clearly marked containers well away from food. Many wild Narcissus species in Portugal and Spain are legally protected and must not be dug from the wild at all, so buy bulbs and leave wild populations alone. Never put bulbs or foliage where stock or poultry can reach them.

Narciso, junquilho (PT); daffodil, narcissus (EN)