American pokeweed

Phytolacca americana

Family · Phytolaccaceae · Can kill

ToxicInvasive

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.

The huge plant with bright red stems and clusters of dark purple berries that fills abandoned ground and damp edges. It came from North America, is toxic from root to seed, and the berries look like grapes to anyone who does not know.

Where it grows

Town and roadside · Roadsides and waste ground · Streams and ditches · Oak woods

Also known as

pokeweed, inkberry

In flower

In fruit

How to tell it

Thick, smooth, clearly red or pink stems that pass two metres in a season. Large, oval, alternate leaves. Clusters of flattened berries with visible segments, dark purple, on a red stalk. The juice stains everything it touches carmine purple.

What it is confused with

Grapevine

Vitis vinifera

Confusion that kills

This is the confusion that matters, because the berries look like a bunch of grapes. The vine is a woody climber with tendrils and a lobed leaf; pokeweed is an upright herb with a red stem and an entire leaf, and climbs nothing.

Open sheet →

What it is for

None. The berry juice was a dye and was even used to colour wine, a long-banned practice. The whole plant contains toxic saponins and lectins, most concentrated in root and seeds, and childhood poisonings from the berries are frequent.

The law says

An invasive alien species in Portugal. Do not plant or propagate it, and removal should happen before the berries ripen, because birds spread them.