Woolly nightshade
Solanum mauritianum
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 South American tree invading Madeiran streams, with large velvety leaves that smell bad and clusters of yellow berries that look like fruit and kill children.
Roadsides and waste ground · Streams and ditches · Oak woods · Town and roadside
Also known asbugweed, tobacco weed, flannel weed
How to tell it
A small tree two to ten metres, everything covered in short dense down giving it a felt feel and a grey-green tone. Large elongated leaves with two small ears at the stalk base. Pale purple flowers with a yellow centre, in posies. Round yellow berries one to one and a half centimetres, in dense clusters. An unpleasant smell when the leaf is crushed.
What it is confused with
Tree tobacco
Nicotiana glauca
Both are small trees with similar names and both are toxic. Tree tobacco is smooth and bluish, entirely hairless, with long yellow trumpet flowers; woolly nightshade is velvety to touch, with small purple flowers and yellow berries.
What it is for
None
The yellow berries hold solasodine in quantity and are responsible for serious poisonings and child deaths in South Africa and New Zealand, precisely because they look like fruit and sit at the height of a small hand. The dust from its hairs irritates the airways of anyone cutting it.
The law says
A listed invasive alien species in Portugal. Do not plant or propagate it.
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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