The black nightshade berry is the small, round, glossy black fruit — barely the size of a pea — that ripens in loose drooping clusters on the sprawling annual herbs of the Solanum nigrum complex, kin to the tomato, potato and eggplant. Green and toxically bitter while unripe but mildly sweet, musky and faintly tomato-like when fully black, the ripe berry is gathered for pies, jams and preserves in North America, southern Africa and Europe, where selected forms are grown as the garden huckleberry, wonderberry and sunberry — and where it is almost always cooked rather than eaten raw.