White Bryony

Overview

White bryony is the only native British member of the cucumber family, which is a stranger conjunction than it sounds. It climbs hedgerows on coiling tendrils, bears small greenish-white flowers, and produces berries that ripen from green through yellow to vivid red — glossy, inviting, and deeply poisonous. The massive white root, forked and shaped like a rough human figure, led English cunning folk to use it as a substitute mandrake: carved into more convincing shapes, sold at fairs, hung over thresholds, and attributed with powers the genuine Mediterranean plant carried at far greater cost.

Botanical Notes

A vigorous climbing perennial with a large, fleshy, white taproot that may weigh several kilograms. Stems to 4 metres, with five-lobed, rough-hairy leaves and branched coiling tendrils. Dioecious: male and female flowers on separate plants; both small, pale greenish-white, from May to September. Female plants bear berries that ripen to red; male plants do not. Common throughout England and Wales in hedgerows, scrub, and woodland edges on chalk and limestone; absent from Scotland and Ireland. Closely related to Black Bryony (*Dioscorea communis*) in name only — the two are not botanically related.

Lore & History

The English mandrake trade ran on white bryony. True mandrake, imported from southern Europe, was expensive; white bryony root, shaped roughly like a human form and further improved by carving or by sewing millet seeds into grooves to produce hair-like growth, was the affordable alternative. Vendors at country fairs sold these "mandrakes" as cures for sterility, as protective talismans, and as means of binding love. The naturalist William Turner complained of the deception in 1551. The practice continued for centuries. That white bryony root is itself highly toxic added an unintended layer of danger to what was already a confidence trick.

Warnings