Wildflowers are one of my passions. Yesterday I spotted this beauty in a hedge near where I live.
This lovely climbing, or at least scrambling, plant is Solanum dulcamara. Dulcamara = Sweet-bitter (think 'La Dolce Vita', and 'Amaretto'). A common English name for it is Bittersweet.
Solanum
seems to come originally from Pliny but I think he confused it with
a different plant1. Both come from
the family that includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines, and if you
have ever observed the flowers of those plants you will see the family
resemblance. Similarities in flower structure are what allows botanists
to classify plants, rather than size, leaf and stem structure, habitat
and so on.
My mother use to
call this (or a very similar plant) deadly nightshade, but although the
fruits of bittersweet are toxic, deadly nightshade is Atropa belladonna. Deadly nightshade has a rich folklore and history 2, including being used for poisoned arrows, so it was literally toxic, because toxic comes from the idea of poisoned tips, via ancient Greek τοξον toxon = bow.
1 "The solanum, according to Cornelius Celsus, is called
"strychnon" by the Greeks; it is possessed of repercussive and
refrigerative properties."
Beautiful but deadly
Wildflowers are one of my passions. Yesterday I spotted this beauty in a hedge near where I live.
This lovely climbing, or at least scrambling, plant is Solanum dulcamara. Dulcamara = Sweet-bitter (think 'La Dolce Vita', and 'Amaretto'). A common English name for it is Bittersweet.
Solanum seems to come originally from Pliny but I think he confused it with a different plant1. Both come from the family that includes potatoes, tomatoes and aubergines, and if you have ever observed the flowers of those plants you will see the family resemblance. Similarities in flower structure are what allows botanists to classify plants, rather than size, leaf and stem structure, habitat and so on.
My mother use to call this (or a very similar plant) deadly nightshade, but although the fruits of bittersweet are toxic, deadly nightshade is Atropa belladonna. Deadly nightshade has a rich folklore and history 2, including being used for poisoned arrows, so it was literally toxic, because toxic comes from the idea of poisoned tips, via ancient Greek τοξον toxon = bow.
1 "The solanum, according to Cornelius Celsus, is called "strychnon" by the Greeks; it is possessed of repercussive and refrigerative properties."
http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D27%3Achapter%3D108
2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atropa_belladonna