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Low toxicity💊 Medicinal☠️ To avoid

🍃 Butterbur (pestilence wort)

Petasites hybridus · Astéracées

🌳 Temperate Europe🏔️ Mountains
🧠 To remember it“Butterbur: the giant colt's foot of riverbanks”—same flowering strategy before the leaves, but on the scale of an umbrella rather than a coin, and the same precautions regarding alkaloids.
Butterbur (pestilence wort) — Petasites hybridus

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

A riverbank plant with spectacular growth: like colt's foot to which it is related, it blooms early in spring on a scaly pink-purple stalk before its leaves appear. These leaves then become the largest in the flora of temperate Europe—up to a meter in diameter, shaped like a hat, colonizing vast carpets along rivers.

  1. scaly pink-purple flower stalk appearing before the leaves, February-April
  2. subsequent immense leaves (30 cm to over 1 m in diameter), rounded heart-shaped, toothed, dull green above, white-cottony underneath
  3. colonizes in dense carpets along riverbanks and shaded wetlands
  4. thick, scaly flowering stem with no true leaves at the time of flowering
  5. slightly musky-sweet smell of the flowers
Sizeup to 1 m in height, leaves up to 1 m in diameter
FloweringFebruary-April (before the leaves)
Habitatriverbanks, shaded wetlands, ditches—colonizes in dense carpets

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Colt's foot (same bloom-before-leaf cycle, but much smaller) (Tussilago farfara)both share the same risk of pyrrolizidine alkaloids and the same medicinal precautions

To tell them apart: butterbur is a much larger plant in all its organs (leaves up to 1 m compared to a few cm for colt's foot), pink-purple flowers in a compact cluster rather than a single yellow flower head

💊 Healing with it

used in Europe for over 900 years in traditional medicine; purified and standardized extracts, stripped of their toxic alkaloids, are studied for migraine prevention and allergic rhinitis, with encouraging clinical results

Level of evidence : limited studies — PMC — Phytochemistry, Toxicology and Therapeutic Value of Petasites hybridus

⚠️ TOXIC in its raw state: the plant contains hepatotoxic and potentially carcinogenic pyrrolizidine alkaloids; only industrially manufactured extracts specifically purified and certified free of pyrrolizidine alkaloids can be used for prolonged use; the raw plant (root, leaf) must never be consumed without this purification, and is contraindicated in cases of pregnancy, breastfeeding, or liver disease

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • large leaves traditionally used as improvised wrapping for butter or cheese before heading out to transhumance, or as a makeshift umbrella due to their size—a use that inspired the genus name Petasites, from the Greek petasos, the wide-brimmed hat of ancient travelers
Sources (2)

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.