A very common species out of the Cucumber family is White bryony. The plants are climbing over other plants with the help of tendrils. When tendrils attach to parts of another plant they develop in opposite direction turning corkscrew-like windings. This way they pull themselves up over other plants in shrubs and brushwood. The plants often have a thick tuberous rhizome from which the stems rise.
White bryony has palmate-veined leaves and the dimensions reach up to 10 cm. The rather big leaves have the contour of an egg. They are clearly lobed with three to five lobes and have a heart shaped base. The midribs of the lobes each have some side ribs like a feather. It seems as if the leaves are spread along the stems, but when looking carefully there is a tendril opposite each leaf. The tendril is a reformed leaf evolutionarily seen.
In the axils of the leaves buds develop raceme inflorescences. It should be noted that White bryony is a dioecious plant species. This means that at one and the same plant that can be very widespread due to the big rhizomes, flowers are developing that only have stamens: a so-called male plant. The plant can also develop female flowers, so flowers with ovaries, only. The green-white to yellow-white flowers have five petals and five sepals. The petals are fused at their feet and even petals and sepals are fused. The male flowers are twice as big as the female flowers and the ovary of the female flower can be found as a green hairless berry about 2 mm underneath the flower. Flowers are mainly visited and fertilised by bees. After fertilisation the ovary develops into a red berry of 7-8 mm wide. Be careful, as this berry is poisonous.
White bryony is a common species growing in shrubs and hedges on calciferous soils. You come across it in dunes and also in vineyards and orchards, but also in cities, as is shown in this video.
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