Redcurrant
Ribes rubrum
Family · Grossulariaceae · Harmless
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
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The garden and hedgerow shrub of the north, with hanging clusters of translucent red berries in early summer. It is edible, and that is why it is here: it is the red fruit that bittersweet nightshade, which is toxic, resembles from a distance.
Oak woods · Streams and ditches · Uplands · Town and roadside
Also known asred currant
How to tell it
A low shrub, WITHOUT thorns, with three- to five-lobed toothed leaves like a small hand. The berries hang in clusters of eight to twenty, all the same size, red and translucent, the seeds visible inside against the light. Bittersweet is not a shrub: it is a thin-stemmed climber twining through other plants, with purple flowers carrying a yellow cone at the centre and loose oval berries, never in a tight cluster.
What it is confused with
Bittersweet nightshade
Solanum dulcamara
A climber, not a shrub, with purple flowers carrying a yellow cone at the centre, like a miniature tomato plant. The berries are oval, glossy, loose, borne in small groups and not in a hanging cluster. They are toxic.
What it is for
Traditionally used as food: eaten raw and made into jelly, and grown for that in the north of the Peninsula. Even so, a red berry on an unknown shrub is not tasted just because it resembles this one.
Traditionally used as food. This is not permission to eat it.
Where it occurs
Sources
Community
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