Southern Wetland Flora
Field Office Guide to Plant Species
Vitis riparia Michx.
- 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.
Previous Species -- Cat Grape (Vitis palmata)
Return to Species List -- Group 9
Next Species -- Muscadine Grape (Vitis rotundifolia)
