FIELD ID CHARACTERISTICS:
Look for leaves with whitish undersides and young stems and fruits with a glaucous coating (like blueberries). Lower stems often densely thorned.
Description: Thorny, slender-stemmed vine with variable leaves with glaucous coating on undersides and stems.
Leaves: Alternate, simple, ovate to lance-shaped, not leathery. Leaf shape is variable. Undersides whitish from glaucous coating.
Flowers/Fruit: Flowers in umbels with stalks 1.5 to 3 times longer than leaf petioles. Berries glaucous black at maturity, persisting through winter. Blooms late April to early June; fruits September to November.
Habit and Range: In both drier and mesic areas: fence rows, old fields, woodlands, floodplain forests, pocosins, swamps. Found statewide.
COMMON CONFUSIONS:
Leaves of Smilax glauca (whiteleaf greenbrier) can be similar to S. rotundifolia (roundleaf greenbrier) or S. laurifolia (laurel greenbrier), which do not have a whitish coating on the leaf undersides or stems.
Click here to view Smilax rotundifolia.
Click here to view Smilax laurifolia.
