Photo: David Eickhoff from Pearl City, Hawaii, USA, CC BY 2.0, Wikimedia Commons

Bittersweet

Solanum dulcamara

Poisonous

Scarlet berries in hedges that look like redcurrants and burn the gut of any child who eats them.

Educational content, not medical or professional advice. In an emergency call your local emergency number (112 in Europe) first. Never eat a wild plant or mushroom because of a website or photo.

⚠️ A child who has eaten the berries needs a call to 112, the CIAV poison line in Portugal, or your own country's poison service. Do not wait for symptoms, and take a photograph or a sample.

⚠️ Do not induce vomiting unless a professional tells you to.

⚠️ Sap irritates skin and eyes. Wear gloves when cutting it out of a hedge.

⚠️ Berries are at their most tempting in late summer when children are out picking blackberries beside them. Teach the purple flower with the yellow beak as a stop sign.

⚠️ Dogs, cattle, sheep and horses are poisoned by it, and it commonly grows in hedges along grazing land.

⚠️ Never use it in pregnancy, breastfeeding, or for children in any traditional preparation.

Confused with

Redcurrant (Ribes rubrum)

Danger: Solanine-type poisoning: burning mouth and throat, vomiting, stomach pain, drowsiness and, with a lot of berries, a slowed heart and breathing trouble. Serious cases are mostly children.

How to tell: Look at the plant, not the berry. Redcurrants grow on an upright woody bush with maple-shaped lobed leaves and hang in long neat strings. Bittersweet scrambles through a hedge, has pointed leaves with little ears at the base, and its berries hang in loose few-berried bunches. If you see purple flowers with a yellow beak anywhere on the plant, it is bittersweet.

Wild tomato and goji berry

Danger: Same burning gut poisoning. People assume any red berry in the nightshade family is a tomato relative worth eating.

How to tell: Goji leaves are narrow and grey-green on a spiny arching shrub and the berries are long ovals. Bittersweet has eared leaves and scrambles without spines. Being a tomato relative does not make anything edible.

Leaves

Dark green, 4 to 12 cm, pointed oval, often with one or two small separate lobes or ears at the base, giving a little arrow or halberd shape. Alternate, thin, slightly hairy.

Flowers

Very distinctive: five backswept purple petals with a bright yellow cone of anthers pointing forward, 1 to 1.5 cm across, in loose drooping clusters. Berries follow, oval, 8 to 12 mm, ripening green to yellow to bright glossy scarlet, hanging in small bunches.

Stem

Woody at the base, green and soft at the tips, round, hollow-ish in older growth, scrambling and twining through other plants.

Smell or taste

Crushed stems smell unpleasant and slightly bitter. The old name comes from a bitter then sweetish taste of the stem, and that is exactly the kind of test this guide tells you never to do.

Habitat

Hedges, riverbanks, reedbeds, damp woodland, ditches, waste ground and shingle. Common across Europe and in damp ground in northern and central Portugal.

Preparation

No preparation makes it safe. Cooking and drying do not remove the glycoalkaloids. Do not make jelly, wine, syrup or tea from any part.

Traditional use

The stems were once dried and used in folk medicine for skin complaints and rheumatism, and it appears in old pharmacopoeias as dulcamara. Those preparations were poisonings waiting to happen and are no longer used. There is no safe home use.

Harvest rule

Cut it out of hedges bordering play areas, poultry runs and paddocks. Gloves on, cut the woody base and pull the growth clear, and bag the berries so seed is not spread. Elsewhere it feeds birds, so leaving it in a wild hedge is reasonable as long as everyone using that path can recognise it.

Doce-amarga, erva-moira-trepadeira (PT); woody nightshade, bittersweet (EN)