Bird cherry
Prunus padus
Family · Rosaceae · Poisonous
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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
The cherry of cold northern streamsides, which instead of small clusters bears long hanging spikes like white cat's tails. The cherries are black, small and so bitter that nobody eats two.
Streams and ditches · Uplands · Oak woods
Also known ashagberry
How to tell it
White flowers in a long hanging SPIKE of twenty or more, not in small clusters of two to six as in wild cherry. A strong sweetish smell of bitter almond when the bark of a young twig is crushed. A glossy black fruit the size of a pea, very bitter. An oval, finely toothed leaf with two red glands on the stalk.
What it is confused with
Wild cherry
Prunus avium
Flowers in small groups of two to six from the same point, not in a long spike. Cherries red to nearly black, sweet or merely tart, and much larger. Bark with shiny horizontal bands.
What it is for
No use to recommend
The leaf, bark and stone carry cyanogenic glycosides, the same as bitter almond, and the almond smell is the warning. The pulp was used in liqueurs in northern Europe, always with the stone removed, and that is not something to reproduce from memory in the field.
Where it occurs
Sources
Community
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