Plants of South Eastern New South Wales
Solanum brownii
Common name
Violet nightshade
Family
Solanaceae
Where found
Forest and woodland with a dense shrubby understorey, and disturbed sites. Blue Mountains and west from there. Mainly farther north than the area covered by this key.
Notes
Shrub to 1.8 m high. Prickles sparse on the branches and juvenile leaves, rarely on the leaf stalks and calyces, absent elsewhere. Fruit fleshy. Stems densely stellate-hairy (needs a hand lens or a macro app on your phone/tablet to see). Leaves alternating up the stems, 6.5–13 cm long, 14–30 mm wide, upper surface dark green to grey-green and sparsely hairy, lower surface yellowish to rusty, often woolly, margins entire or wavy. Juvenile leaves to 10 cm long and 30 mm wide, margins shallowly to deeply lobed. Flowers purple or violet to pale blue, rarely white, 22–40 mm in diameter, tubular with a short tube and 5 spreading lobes or star-shaped, in clusters of 5–8 flowers. Flowering: Winter to Spring. Fruit white or green to yellow, round, 10–29 mm in diameter.
PlantNET description: http://plantnet.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/cgi-bin/NSWfl.pl?page=nswfl&lvl=sp&name=Solanum~brownii (accessed 7 February, 2021)
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