Nightshade

Overview

Nightshade is the plant of the black-eyed berries, the shiny dark fruit of shady hedges that hedgerow children are taught to leave alone. It grows wherever the cradle-web has hedges and ruins, and in the Broken Marches it fills the old courts. In measure it is a healer's medicine; in a handful it is death. Its poisoning is told under Poison Herbs.

Appearance

It is a tall, branching, leafy plant, waist- to chest-high, with large, soft, oval, pointed leaves of dull dark green, often in unequal pairs, a big leaf with a small one beside it. In summer it hangs single, nodding, bell-shaped flowers of dull purple-brown, tinged green inside, from the leaf joints. They become glossy black berries the size of a cherry, each sitting in a green five-pointed star, sweetish to the taste and full of a dark purple juice. The plant has a faint, unpleasant smell when bruised.

Habitat and Range

It likes shade and rich, limy, disturbed ground: hedge-bottoms, wood edges, the walls of old enclosures, and above all ruins and the courts of old works, where lime from fallen mortar sweetens the soil. It grows through the cradle-web from the basin hedges to the ruin-courts of the Marches and the yards of the Greyford Reach.

Behaviour and Temperament

A long-lived plant that dies back each winter and comes again from a thick root. Birds eat the berries and spread the seed into new ruins and hedges; beasts mostly leave it.

Life Cycle

It flowers through the summer and fruits from late summer into autumn, so that flowers and berries hang on the same plant. The root lives for many years.

Uses and Dangers

Healers use leaf and root, dried and weighed, in tiny measure: to ease the cramps of the bowel and the breath, to dry a running nose and mouth, and as drops in the eye to widen it, which oculists and some court ladies do for different reasons. Poisoners use it in larger measure (see Made Poisons). Its berries kill children more often than grown people, since a few are enough for a small body and they taste sweet. Marches Goblins, who know the ruin-courts best, pull it from any court where children play.

Lore and Belief

"Black and shiny, leave it be" is the hedgerow rule. Folk tales say nightshade was the plant of witches, who rubbed it on their skin to fly, and the raving and visions of the poisoning (they see what is not in the room) give that tale its root. Some dream-workers believe a little of it opens the eye to the Dreaming Veil; what it opens is delirium. Goblins call it the courtyard cherry and count its berries in a rhyme for children that ends badly.

Poisoners use it as freely as healers, and the Marches tell of a bandit band poisoned with a stew of the courtyard cherry by the household they meant to rob.

Where It Appears

• Poison Herbs