Black bryony
Dioscorea communis
Family · Dioscoreaceae · Poisonous
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 glossy heart-shaped leaves that goes up hedges by twining its stem, with no tendrils at all, and in autumn covers itself in showy clusters of red berries. The berries are toxic and attract children.
Oak woods · Roadsides and waste ground · Walls and rocks · Streams and ditches
Also known aslady's seal, black bindweed
How to tell it
A heart-shaped, entire, glossy leaf with veins all radiating from the base and converging at the tip, which is rare and very characteristic. A stem that twines on its own, with no tendrils. Translucent red berries in hanging clusters.
What it is confused with
White bryony
Bryonia dioica
Both climb the same hedge and both bear toxic red berries. White bryony has spiral tendrils and a rough five-lobed leaf; black bryony has no tendrils and an entire, smooth, glossy leaf.
What it is for
The young shoots are eaten in Spain, boiled with the first water thrown away, and sold in markets as espárragos de nuez. It carries no edible tag here on purpose: the same plant has very toxic berries and root, and a use that depends on getting the part and the preparation right is not a use for a field guide.
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
No approved contributions for this entry yet.
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.