When you inherit plants either by buying a home, through friends, or self seeded plants you never know what you are getting. What variety is it? Is it edible? Is it poisonous? It is invasive? Is it a weed? Etc. Anyway since we've had our place this plant has popped up year after year. Having this new found love of gardening grow and grow over the last year or so I decided to get familiar with my plants on a name to name basis starting with the few I knew then trying to ID the few I don't. So I took some pics and posted them on GardenWeb (great resource) asking for ID help.
Help came in, saying it was a Solanum, nightshade family. Now I know that includes eggplants and tomatoes so the jury is still out on the variety. So I go looking online and it COULD be a wonderberry (edible when the berries are ripe) or it COULD be black nightshade which along with many other COULD be varieties is poisonous!!!
Long story short the day after I did the research I dug it out and disposed of it, too risky in my garden, not to mention a waste of edible space. The other thing that strikes me as a 'could be poisonous' plant is that River got sick 2 weeks ago. She's been sick same time every year for the last three years. The first year was worse at 10 days, then last year just 4 days, and this year was 2. I of course looked up the symptoms of thepoisoning and guess what? Yep matched Roo-Roo's symptoms!
Just incase you are wondering symptoms of black nightshade poisoning:
Bolded the symptoms River had, though it's hard to say if your dog is delirious, has halucinations, headaches etc, so tough to call those. She was very fatigued and in obvious pain for 24 hours. She also was extremely thirsty during this time which can also be caused by this poisoning. Anyway needless to say the plant got dug up and trashed, and I'm not sorry to see it go.
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