Autumn Crocus

Quick facts

For identification. Not a growing guide.

How to recognize it in each season.

1. 1

   Broad spring leaves (the foraging hazard)

   Feb to May, every year

   • Stalkless glossy strap leaves with NO onion smell
     Months after the flowers, a tight rosette of broad, thick, glossy strap-shaped leaves pushes straight out of the ground, 8 to 12 inches long and up to 2 inches wide. This is the stage gathered in mistake for ramps and wild garlic. The rule is absolute: crush a leaf, and a true wild Allium reeks of onion or garlic. Colchicum has no smell at all. No onion smell means it is not a ramp, and you do not eat it.
   • Look for a seed pod sitting in the middle of the rosette
     The best single tell, and one no Allium can produce: from mid-spring a fat green three-parted seed capsule often sits at ground level in the centre of the leaf rosette - last autumn's flower finally ripening its fruit. Note also how the leaves attach. Ramps leaves each rise on their own stalk, usually flushed reddish-purple at the base; Colchicum leaves are stalkless and sheathed together straight from the corm.
   • Know where you are standing
     Habitat separates them almost as well as smell. Ramps grow in dense colonies on the rich shaded floor of deciduous woodland. Colchicum grows in open ground - damp meadow, rough grass, lawns, orchards and old garden borders. A broad-leaved plant in open grass is not a ramp, whatever it looks like.

   Key signs

   • Broad strap leaves in open grass with no onion smell
   • A green seed capsule sitting in the middle of a leaf rosette
   • Any spring green gathered near a garden or an old meadow rather than in woodland
2. 2

   Seed capsule ripening

   May to Jul, every year

   • The seeds are the most concentrated part - keep them out of hay
     The capsule splits in early summer and sheds small dark seeds that carry colchicine at its highest concentration. In grassland this is how the plant spreads and how it reaches livestock: colchicine survives drying completely, so plants cut into hay stay poisonous all winter. Remove capsules before they open where the ground is grazed or mown for hay, wearing gloves, and bag them.

   Key signs

   • Split capsules shedding seed into grass
   • Colchicum growing in a field mown for hay or bedding
   • Seed spread along mower paths
3. 3

   Summer rest (the corm underground)

   Jul to Aug, every year

   • A dormant corm is not an onion, and does not smell like one
     The leaves yellow and vanish by midsummer, leaving a fat brown-tunicked corm underground that looks unnervingly like a shallot or a small onion. Corms are sold loose in late summer and get left in sheds and drawers. Never store them anywhere near food or seed potatoes, label them if they exist at all, and remember the same test: an onion smells of onion when cut, and this does not.

   Key signs

   • Loose corms stored near food, onions or seed potatoes
   • Bare ground in a lawn or border where the leaves have died away
4. 4

   Leafless autumn goblets (the saffron confusion)

   Aug to Nov, every year

   • Count the stamens: SIX means Colchicum, THREE means crocus
     In autumn, large lilac-pink goblets rise from completely bare ground on a long pale tube, with no leaf anywhere - which is where the name naked ladies comes from. This is the decisive check against saffron crocus. Every true crocus, saffron included, carries exactly THREE stamens. Colchicum carries SIX. Count them before anything else.
   • No red threads, ever
     Saffron crocus is identified by three long, deep-red, thread-like stigmas hanging out of the flower - those threads are the saffron. Colchicum has three styles that are white to pale yellow and it never produces red threads. Saffron crocus also pushes narrow grass-like leaves with a white midrib at or just after flowering; Colchicum flowers on entirely bare ground. If there are no red threads, there is no saffron.
   • Do not cut it for the house or gather it for anything
     The flowers are as poisonous as the rest of the plant. Do not add them to arrangements, never near edible flowers or a kitchen, and keep them away from children, who find the bare pink goblets in short grass very inviting. Handle in gloves and wash afterwards.

   Key signs

   • Lilac goblets appearing from bare ground with no leaves
   • Six stamens rather than three
   • Flowers picked as saffron, or picked by children in a lawn

Hazards

Good & bad neighbors

First rule: keep Ramps apart. Never let colchicum grow in or near ground where ramps are gathered, and never gather ramps from open grass where it might be.