Photo: Sphl, CC BY-SA 3.0, Wikimedia Commons

Spurge

Euphorbia species

Poisonous

Break any part of it and it bleeds a milky latex that burns skin and can blind you.

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.

⚠️ If sap touches skin, wash immediately with soap and plenty of water and keep it out of the sun. If sap gets in an eye, irrigate with clean water for at least 15 minutes and get medical help the same day. Call 112, the CIAV poison line in Portugal, or your own country's service for eye injury or for anything swallowed.

⚠️ If any part is swallowed, do not wait for symptoms. Call your poison service and take a photograph of the plant.

⚠️ Do not induce vomiting unless a professional tells you to, because the latex burns on the way back up.

⚠️ Never rub your eyes or face while weeding, and never strim a spurge stand without eye protection. Most serious injuries are eye injuries from strimming or from a sap-covered hand.

⚠️ Children playing with snapped stems and dogs brushing through stands both get burns. Poinsettia, which people bring indoors at Christmas, is the same genus.

⚠️ Latex stains and dries on gloves and tools, so wash both before you touch your face.

Confused with

Sow thistle, dandelion and other milky-sapped edible greens

Danger: Euphorbia latex causes intense burning of the mouth, throat and gut, vomiting and diarrhoea. On skin it causes redness and blistering, and in the eye it causes severe pain, swelling and sometimes lasting damage or temporary blindness.

How to tell: Look at the leaf arrangement and the flower. Dandelion and sow thistle have all their leaves in a rosette or clasping the stem, with clear toothed dandelion-type leaves and a proper yellow daisy flower. Spurges have leaves crowded up a stiff upright stem and green cup-like flower structures with no petals. Milky sap plus green petalless flowers means do not touch.

Purslane and other fleshy edible succulents

Danger: Fleshy spurges look very like purslane in dry ground, and the burning is immediate.

How to tell: Snap the stem. Purslane sap is clear and watery. Every spurge bleeds thick white latex within a second or two. Clear sap, look further. White milk, stop.

Leaves

Very variable between species, but typically narrow, untoothed or finely toothed, often blue-green or grey-green, arranged alternately or in dense whorls up the stem, crowded towards the top. Some are fleshy and cactus-like.

Flowers

Never showy petals. Small green, yellow-green, or maroon-centred cup structures with crescent-shaped glands around the rim, grouped in a flat or umbrella-shaped head, often with leaf-like bracts of the same colour beneath. Poinsettia is the same genus.

Stem

Green to reddish, often stout and unbranched below the flower head, sometimes woody at the base. The single defining feature is the sap: cut or snap any stem or leaf and a thick white milky latex runs out immediately. That is the identification.

Smell or taste

Sap smells faintly acrid. Never taste anything, and do not let the latex near your mouth.

Habitat

Everywhere. Garden beds, dry hillsides, dunes, walls, cultivated soil, roadsides and waste ground throughout Portugal and Europe. There are hundreds of species and all of them have the latex.

Preparation

No preparation makes any spurge safe. Cooking, drying and soaking do not destroy the diterpene esters in the latex. Do not use it as a green, a tea, a wart treatment on skin or a fish poison.

Traditional use

Spurge latex has been used traditionally to burn off warts and corns, and as a purgative, and several species were used to stun fish. Those uses caused burns, eye injuries and severe poisoning. The latex is also a known tumour promoter. Do not repeat any of it at home.

Harvest rule

Not harvested. To clear it, wear waterproof gloves, long sleeves and eye protection, cut rather than strim, and wash tools and clothes afterwards. Never burn large amounts, since the smoke irritates eyes and airways. Some native Euphorbia species are protected in dune and cliff habitats, so check local rules before clearing on the coast, and leave wild stands that are not in anyone's way.

Leiteira, trovisco-macho, euforbia, maleiteira (PT); spurge (EN)