Today’s PEI plant is one that I’ve received many questions about, along with a request to do a post on it. So, meet Bittersweet Nightshade (Solanum dulcamera)! If these flowers remind you of tomato or potato blossoms, give yourself a gold star. Bittersweet Nightshade is in the same family (and the same genus) as those domestic crops, and is related to other familiar species including eggplant, peppers (both sweet and hot), gogi berries, and tobacco. Bittersweet Nightshade

PEI has wildflowers that are beautiful, edible, and ecologically important. Today we have an example that’s all three, and flowering now: Fireweed (Chamaenerion angustifolium)! Fireweed can be found across the Island, blooming in vacant urban lots, along rural roads and fields, and among forests impacted by 2022’s Hurricane Fiona. While it gets its name from an ability to recolonize land following wildfire, it doesn’t need fire to appear: any disturbance will do. Fireweed i

In the last three editions of ‘Permian to Present’ we looked at aspects of PEI’s forests and wildlife hundreds of years ago, before...