White bryony
Bryonia dioica
Family · Cucurbitaceae · 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 spiral tendrils that runs up hedges and leaves clusters of red berries in late summer. It looks like a miniature vine, and is a poisonous member of the gourd family in disguise.
Roadsides and waste ground · Oak woods · Walls and rocks · Streams and ditches
Also known asred bryony, wild vine
How to tell it
Coiled spring-like tendrils, rough five-lobed leaves, and glossy red berries in small clusters. The root is a huge white turnip, and is the most toxic part.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None
The red berries attract children and are among the most recorded paediatric poisonings from European hedgerows. Half a dozen is enough for an emergency.
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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Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.