American pokeweed
Phytolacca americana
Family · Phytolaccaceae · Can kill
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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
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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.
Town and roadside · Roadsides and waste ground · Streams and ditches · Oak woods
Also known aspokeweed, inkberry
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
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.
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.
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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