The overall appearance is of a rather bushy, fern like plant. The leaves are compound and feathery, with soft, needle-shaped leaflets about 1 inch long grouped in clusters of up to 5, alternately attached. The stems are many branched, slender and weak, sometimes erect but often drooping. 1 to 3 flowers arise from the leaf axils in the upper part of the plant. Individual flowers are about 1/4 inch long, bell-shaped with 6 pale yellow to greenish tepals (petals), 6 orange-tipped stamens, on a slender stalk up to an inch long. Fruit is a shiny red berry 1/4 to 1/3 inch in diameter, containing up to 6 seeds. The berries persist through the winter.

Rubbish tips and waste places as an escape from cultivation.

In flower during June, July and August.

Perennial.

Widespread records from the southern half of Britain, more local in the north.

Introduced/garden escape or throw-out.  In the VC55 Checklist (Jeeves, 2011) it is listed as Alien, scarce. 

It was on the 2011 VC55 Rare Plant Register (Jeeves, 2011) but is not on the current RPR (Hall & Woodward, 2022) because records are of introduced plants