Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Berries tasty and toxic

by Bob Brett, Whistler Naturalists Blue berries, for juicy pies; Eat ’em now, and no-one dies. White berries, a little pale; Eat ’em now, will your heart fail? Red berries, stacked way up tall; Eat ’em now, you won’t see fall.

by Bob Brett,

Whistler Naturalists

Blue berries, for juicy pies;

Eat ’em now, and no-one dies.

White berries, a little pale;

Eat ’em now, will your heart fail?

Red berries, stacked way up tall;

Eat ’em now, you won’t see fall.

Red berries, take a good look;

Eat ’em now? First check a book.

Roughly speaking, berries can be broken down into blues, whites, and reds. As the fractured poem states, you won’t die eating a local blue berry. White and red berries are a little more trouble.

White berries were often called ghost or corpse berries by First Nations people, a not-so-subtle prediction for the fate of people who ate them. At worst, local white berries are deadly poisonous. At best, they’re inedible. Either way, not a great choice for your pie.

Red is probably the most common colour for berries, and the vast majority are edible: raspberry, thimbleberry, five-leaved bramble, western teaberry, red huckleberry, and even bunchberry (a.k.a. dwarf dogwood or crackleberry). But be careful. Western yew shrubs produce a fruit that looks a lot like a red huckleberry. The fruit (actually an aril) consists of a highly poisonous seed surrounded by a juicy red covering.

Be especially suspicious if your red berries are "stacked way up tall". There are two local plants that fit this description, devil’s club and baneberry. Neither should be included in your dinner recipes. Devil’s club, while apparently not poisonous to humans, is much better left to the bears. Baneberry is a different matter.

The first warning is in its name – from an old Anglo-Saxon root meaning "murderous". According to Pojar and MacKinnon (in Plants of Coastal BC ), all parts of the plant are highly poisonous, and "as few as 6 berries can induce vomiting, bloody diarrhea and finally paralysis of respiration."

To confuse matters slightly, baneberries can be either shiny red or shiny white (like snooker balls), sometimes even on adjacent plants. Either way, don’t serve stacked berries to your dinner guests, unless of course they refuse to help with the dishes.

Lots of other poisonous plants grow here, but since they don’t have attractive berries they’re less likely to be eaten by an uniformed muncher. Examples include Indian false hellebore, poison hemlock, most members of the buttercup family (like larkspur and monkshood), as well as lupines and vetches.

Learning to distinguish tasty from toxic is a very compelling reason to learn your plants. It’s also likely to increase your chances of receiving a return invitation from your dinner guests.

Upcoming Events:

Perseid Meteor Watching: Thursday, Aug. 11 th . Join the Astronomy Club at dark in Rainbow Park to enjoy the show in the sky. Note that the first-quarter moon will set in mid- to late evening, leaving the sky nicely dark for the prime meteor-watching hours from about midnight until the first glimmer of dawn.

Nature Walk: Wednesday, Aug. 17 th . Join Fisheries Biologist Lisa Helmer for a tour around One Mile Lake in Pemberton and learn about wetlands and their importance for flood protection, pollution and excess nutrient filtration, and of course fish & wildlife habitat. Meet in the parking lot at 6:30.