Solanum dulcamara Seeds | Bittersweet Nightshade
LATIN NAME: Solanum dulcamara
COMMON NAME: Bittersweet Nightshade
Plant Profile
Bittersweet Nightshade is a scrambling, semi-woody climber of Europe and Asia, twining through hedges and fences to two or three metres with arrow-shaped, dark green leaves. From early summer it opens loose sprays of small violet-purple flowers with bright yellow stamens held forward like a beak, and by autumn the plant is hung with small, glossy, red berries.
It thrives in moist ground and hedgerow shade, tolerating both sun and half shade, and its berries persist into winter, feeding birds long after other fruit is gone. It is a wild plant of ditches and waysides rather than a border flower, and it seeds itself where conditions suit it.
Science & Biotechnology
The species’ chemistry has been studied for two centuries: the stems hold dulcamarine glycoalkaloids, and the plant has a long, contradictory record in European folk medicine as both a remedy and a poison. Botanists place it among the wild nightshades that helped map the genus’s alkaloid chemistry.
Its ecology is equally documented: the berries are dispersed mainly by birds, which explains the plant’s constant reappearance in hedgerows and waste ground, and it serves as a host plant for several specialist moth species of the nightshade family. Chemists isolated the dulcamarines in the nineteenth century, and the species remains a reference plant for the study of steroidal glycoalkaloid variation within a single species across its range. Its berry colour and persistence have been studied in the context of bird foraging, with thrushes taking the fruit steadily through winter and depositing seed along hedgerows and woodland edges.
Uses & Benefits
For wildlife, it earns its place: nectar through summer, berries for thrushes through winter, and dense twining cover for nesting birds. In the wild garden it can clothe an ugly fence where little else scrambles.
The berries are for birds, not for the table; like many nightshades the plant carries toxic alkaloids, and it should not be planted where children or pets range. Folk records of its use run long but belong to another era of medicine. Gardeners who keep chickens or plant for poultry runs sometimes use its dense cover as a shade screen, though the same rule applies: berries and birds, never berries and the family dog. In wildlife plantings it is often combined with other bird-food shrubs to stretch the winter fruit season, its red berries holding after haws and rowans are stripped.
Growing from Seed
Sow in spring on the surface of a light compost, cover thinly and keep warm and moist; germination is steady over two or three weeks. A period of cold stratification improves it on older seed.
Set the young plants against a fence or shrub in sun or light shade with moist soil, and let them climb. Cut the stems back in late winter to keep the plant within bounds, and pull seedlings where they are not wanted. It tolerates heavy clay and damp shade better than most climbers, which is exactly where it belongs: the wet, unkempt corner where ornamental climbers sulk. Gloves are worth wearing when cutting it back; the sap stains skin orange-brown, a harmless but memorable reaction noted in every field guide to the plant.
Our Take
A hedgerow climber with summer flowers and winter berries, grown for the birds and the wild look. Keep it out of reach of children and it repays the space.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Bittersweet Nightshade: