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Low toxicity💊 Medicinal☠️ To avoid

🌼 Coltsfoot

Tussilago farfara · Asteraceae

🌳 Temperate Europe🏔️ Mountains
🧠 To remember it“Coltsfoot: the flower before the leaf” — the only common early spring plant to bloom in yellow without a single visible leaf; the hoof-shaped leaves only arrive later.
Coltsfoot — Tussilago farfara

🔍 Identify it without mistakes

One of the very first spring flowers, emerging as early as February-March on bare soil or embankments, BEFORE its leaves: solitary yellow flower heads pop up alone from the ground on a scaly stalk. Only after flowering do the large leaves grow in the shape of a donkey's hoof (hence the name coltsfoot), green on top and white-woolly underneath.

  1. solitary yellow flower heads on a scaly stalk WITHOUT ANY VISIBLE LEAVES, in February-March
  2. heart-shaped leaves, shaped like a hoof or donkey footprint, appearing only AFTER flowering
  3. underside of leaves white and woolly, upper surface bright green, smooth
  4. preferentially colonizes bare, disturbed, clay, and chalky soils (embankments, scree, construction sites)
  5. flower heads close at night and in overcast weather, like dandelion
Size10-30 cm
FloweringFebruary-April (before the leaves)
Habitatembankments, scree, disturbed clay and limestone soils, often a pioneer colonizer of bare ground

⚠️ Not to be confused with

Other early yellow flower heads (little risk of confusion given the leaf-free flowering)no dangerous confusion documented, the flower-before-leaf cycle is very distinctive

To tell them apart: no other common plant in our regions blooms with solitary yellow flower heads completely devoid of visible leaves at the same time

Butterbur (Petasites hybridus)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 parts (leaves up to 1 m compared to a few cm for coltsfoot), pinkish-mauve flowers in a compact cluster rather than a single yellow head

💊 Healing with it

traditionally used since Antiquity as an expectorant and soothing agent for coughs (its very name, tussilago, comes from the Latin tussis, meaning 'cough')

Level of evidence : traditional use — Wikiphyto — Tussilage; clinical cases review of hepatotoxicity

⚠️ the plant contains hepatotoxic and potentially carcinogenic pyrrolizidine alkaloids (senecionine, senkirkine); prolonged use (more than one cumulative month per year) is discouraged, and internal use is prohibited during pregnancy, breastfeeding, and in children; a review of reported clinical cases notes that most poisonings attributed to coltsfoot actually resulted from confusion with other toxic plants — caution remains necessary with wild, uncultivated plants

🪓 Other bushcraft uses

  • dried and rolled leaves were traditionally smoked in Europe as a tobacco substitute to treat coughs until the 19th century, before the risk of pyrrolizidine alkaloids was identified
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.