Rhubarb
Rheum rhabarbarum
Eating this will make you ill. Listed here so you can recognise and avoid it.
A large-leaved perennial grown for its thick, fleshy leaf stalks, which rise each spring from a woody crown and carry crinkled, roughly triangular blades up to half a metre across. The stalks, green through to deep red depending on cultivar, are sharply acidic and are cooked with sugar for pies, crumbles and compotes. The leaf blades are not eaten.
A garden and allotment plant throughout Britain and Ireland, wanting deep, moist, fertile soil and a cold winter to break dormancy. Turns up outside cultivation on tips, railway land and roadside verges where crowns have been dumped, where it can persist for years.
Only the leaf stalks are eaten, and they are cooked rather than raw. The blades hold high levels of oxalic acid together with anthraquinone glycosides and bring on vomiting and abdominal pain, so strip them off at the top of the stalk and discard them. The stalks themselves are also oxalate-rich, so anyone prone to kidney stones may want to keep portions modest. Plants growing on verges and tips may carry road pollution.
Always use more than one reference to confirm a plant. You are responsible for what you choose to forage.
Leaf stalk
Thick and fleshy, 2–5 cm wide, flattened and grooved along the upper face rather than round in cross-section, and snapping with a wet crack. Colour runs from green to deep crimson by cultivar, not by ripeness, so a green stalk is not an unready one.
Leaf blade
Very large, up to 50 cm or more, broadly triangular to heart-shaped with a wavy, puckered margin and a matt surface. This is the part that is discarded; nothing above the top of the stalk goes in the pan.
Habit and crown
A clump-forming perennial rising from a thick woody crown at ground level, with stalks radiating outwards in a loose rosette. The whole plant dies back to nothing over winter and reappears from the same crown in early spring.
Flower spike
A branched spike 1–2 m tall carrying many small creamy-white to greenish flowers in early summer. Its appearance signals the crown is running to seed and stalk quality falling off; cutting it out extends picking.
Updated 2026-08-08T06:53:01.562Z · Part of the shared Foragers Log catalogue · Vegetable