Bittersweet nightshade
Solanum dulcamara
Family · Solanaceae · Can kill
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
Emergency
The climber with purple flowers and a beaked yellow centre, like a tomato star, and glossy red berries hanging in clusters. The berries look like redcurrants and are not.
Streams and ditches · Roadsides and waste ground · Oak woods · Town and roadside
Also known aswoody nightshade, climbing nightshade
How to tell it
A stem woody at the base, climbing or leaning, to two metres. Alternate arrowhead leaves, many with two separate lobes at the base, like two small ears. Flowers with five purple petals bent back and yellow stamens fused into a forward-pointing cone. Oval berries, green then bright glossy red.
What it is confused with
Redcurrant
Ribes rubrum
This is the dangerous confusion, because the red clusters look alike. Redcurrant is an upright shrub with five-lobed vine-like leaves, and its berries are translucent with seeds visible inside; bittersweet climbs, has arrowhead leaves and opaque berries. A red berry on a climber is not eaten.
What it is for
None
It contains solanine and solasodine: the berries cause vomiting, abdominal pain, dilated pupils and nervous system depression, and are among the most recorded childhood poisonings in Europe because they are red, shiny and at a child's height. The name comes from the taste, sweet first then bitter, and nobody should be finding that out.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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