The open plant encyclopedia
Snap a photo or search by any name to see how to care for it, where it comes from, whether it's safe, and a 3D model you can turn.
The plants people record most in your country, and ones that grow there wild.
Filter by what you want to do, shape, origin, country, care and safety.
Tofieldia
Also called False Asphodel, Bog Asphodel
Tofieldia is a small genus of flowering plants described as a genus in 1778. It is widespread across much of Europe, Asia, and North America.
Tofieldia was once placed in the lily family, but is now generally included in the newer family Tofieldiaceae. The genus sometimes includes species of genus Triantha. Tofieldia are rhizomatous perennial herbs with spikes or racemes of lily-like flowers.
The acridity and potential toxicity of Tofieldia spp., when raw, may be accounted for by the fact that the genus, like other basal monocots (including, most notably, the related plant family Araceae) contains calcium oxalate crystals, present, in the case of Tofieldia, arranged in druses and as cuboidal crystals, rather than the raphides more usual in the Araceae. In this connection, it may be noted that the species T. pusilla, when used in Scottish traditional medicine is prepared as a herbal tea and thus subjected to both heat and steeping - both of which are used in the preparation of calcium oxalate-containing plants for food, as a means of eliminating the irritating oxalate crystals - most notably in the case of the popular tropical vegetable taro.
At least three species of Tofieldia have been used in traditional medicine:
Text excerpted from the Wikipedia article Tofieldia by its contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0; the excerpts are shared under the same licence.
