Physalis ixocarpa

Ground Cherry at Quaama, NSW

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Identification history

Unidentified

25 Apr 2020

FionaG

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User's notes

Found this plant in our gully. Looks like some sort of gooseberry though not the same as the gooseberries I grow. The leaves are similar in shape but these are brighter green in colour and smooth and thin.

5 comments

JackieMiles wrote:

26 Apr 2020

Well spotted - same genus as cape gooseberry (Physalis peruviana). Those papery capsules around the fruit are a bit of a give-away. Both are introduced. Cape Gooseberry is by far the more common around here, as a weed of shady moist places. They are in the Solanum family and not related at all to the English Gooseberry.

FionaG wrote:

26 Apr 2020

Jackie, are they edible?

JackieMiles wrote:

26 Apr 2020

Don't know, sorry. Though I would think if they were we'd be cultivating them, like cape gooseberry. You could try a tentative taste and then spit it out in case it is toxic, if the birds leave any of them to get ripe. But I'd be more inclined to pull it out on the grounds that it doesn't belong there. Was this a post-fire appearance or in an unburnt area? We had some odd weeds that we'd never seen here before after our fire in 2018. Being a bit of a weeding fanatic I removed any I found, so don't know how long they might have persisted if left to their own devices.

FionaG wrote:

26 Apr 2020

We, thankfully, were untouched but the fire burnt around three of our boundary fences. Since the flood that followed the fire we are seeing a heap of different weeds and plants growing in the creek bed as well as a sea of Fireweed and Stinking Roger springing up on the property. This plant was found in exactly the conditions you mentioned, our damp gully. It is completely new for our property.

JackieMiles wrote:

27 Apr 2020

Yep, this seems to be the season for weed incursions, and floods are another good way of bringing things in. I really thought I'd knocked off all our inkweed after our fire, and now it is back again as vigorous as ever since the rain. Stinking Roger, being a warm season weed, really loved the rainfall timing and is now everywhere, making a mockery of my attempts to keep it off our road altogether. Still winning on our place, but the road verges and the neighbours' places - brrrr! But determined weeding at the crucial moment can work sometimes - I'm getting a lot less fleabane on our place since I weeded the hell out of it a few years ago when it ran amok after a big rainfall event, and pulled all the seed off and burnt it.

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