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Southern Wetland Flora

Field Office Guide to Plant Species

River-bank Grape
Vitis riparia Michx.

JPG -- Species Photo GIF -- Distribution Map

Family: Grape (Vitaceae)
Flowering: May-June
Field Marks: This grape lacks cobwebby hairs on the leaves, has green, gray, or brown branchlets, and usually has three sharply toothed lobes.
Habitat: Along streams, wet woods, damp thickets.
Habit: Woody vine with tendrils, or sometimes trailing on the ground and over low vegetation.
Stems: Climbing or trailing, round in cross-section or slightly angular, smooth, the branchlets green, gray, or brown; bark at maturity becoming flaky.
Leaves: Alternate, simple, usually with 2 sharply toothed lobes on either side of the terminal lobe, smooth except for hairs on the veins of the lower surface, up to 6 inches long, often nearly as wide; leaf stalks smooth, rarely red.
Flowers: Many, small, in panicles up to 6 inches long; some flowers with both stamens and pistils, others with one or the other, sometimes the two sexes on separate plants.
Sepals: 5, united, green, very small.
Petals: 5, free from each other, greenish yellow.
Stamens: 5.
Pistils: Ovary superior.
Fruits: Berries blue-black, glaucous, spherical, up to 1/2 inch in diameter, containing 2-4 seeds.
Notes: The fruits are very acidic.

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Page Last Modified: Thursday, 03-Aug-2006 11:39:25 EDT
Menlo Park, CA [caww54]