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Low toxicity💊 Medicinal☠️ To avoid

⚠️ Common Comfrey

Symphytum officinale · Boraginaceae

🌳 Temperate Europe🏔️ Mountains
🧠 To remember it“Comfrey heals the outside, never the inside” — the only plant in this encyclopedia with a black-and-white ban on food use.
Common Comfrey — Symphytum officinale

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

Large, robust plant with broad, lanceolate, rough, and hairy leaves that are decurrent along the winged stem (the leaf extends as wings down the stem, a very reliable identifying feature). Drooping tubular bell-shaped flowers, grouped in coiled scorpioid cymes, ranging in color from mauve, pink, to cream-white depending on the variety. Root is black on the outside, white and mucilaginous on the inside.

  1. decurrent leaves forming wings along the stem
  2. rough leaves, hairy to the touch (stiff hairs)
  3. drooping bell-shaped flowers, cymes coiled like a shepherd's crook
  4. robust, angular, hairy stem
  5. root black externally, white and mucilaginous inside
Size40-120 cm
Floweringmai-juillet
Habitatriverbanks and damp ditches, cool meadows, gardens (often cultivated)

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Foxglove (at the rosette stage, before flowering) (Digitalis purpurea)deadly for foxglove (cardiac glycosides)

To tell them apart: foxglove leaves are embossed, velvety to the touch (fine, soft down, not rough), without decurrent wings on the stem, and grow in a dense rosette during the first year without a flowering stem; if in doubt about an unflowered rosette, never harvest

🍽️ Eating it

Tastenot applicable (food use not recommended)

Preparation : INTERNAL USE NOT RECOMMENDED: comfrey was long eaten as a vegetable or fritter in traditional cooking, but this practice is now forbidden by health authorities (see medicinal section) — this guide does not recommend any food preparation

💊 Healing with it

EXTERNAL use ONLY as a poultice or ointment for sprains, contusions, and bruises (well-documented local healing and anti-inflammatory effect, mainly due to allantoin)

Level of evidence : etudes-solides for external use (positive clinical trials for sprains and osteoarthritis, recognized by the EMA/HMPC); internal use is strictly advised against — EMA — Public statement on the use of herbal medicinal products containing toxic pyrrolizidine alkaloids; EMA/HMPC monograph Symphyti radix (external use only)

⚠️ INTERNAL USE PROHIBITED in France, Germany, and by the WHO since the 1990s: the plant contains hepatotoxic, mutagenic, and potentially carcinogenic pyrrolizidine alkaloids that silently accumulate in the liver. Even externally, never apply to broken skin, never use for more than 4 to 6 weeks per year, and avoid during pregnancy, breastfeeding, or in children

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • used in organic gardening as a compost activator and liquid fertilizer rich in potassium (external garden use, unrelated to consumption)
Sources (3)

No entry replaces a certain identification in the field, or medical advice. When in doubt: don't eat it. If ingestion is suspected: poison control or 112/911.