Plant Spirits

Aug 13, 2009 11:14


Extreme botany: When plants attack!
Beware lily of the valley! Watch out for rhubarb leaves! Don't touch that foxglove! A new book catalogues the ghastly properties and grisly history of our most beloved flora

On July 30, 2004, a young Toronto actor named Andre Noble was walking though the woods with some former classmates on Silver Fox Island, near his family home in Newfoundland. He encountered a patch of monkshood. With its cowl-like purple flowers, monkshood grows lush at the end of summer. It can be alluring.

By the end of the day Noble was dead. It was not clear how the poison had entered his system; two to five milligrams of the plant's sap can kill.

Noble, his father said later, enjoyed being in nature and loved herbs and health food. He may have mistaken a monkshood plant's white, carrot-shaped root for something more benign.

Monkshood is also known as aconite, and it is with this flower that Amy Stewart begins her alphabetic compendium of deadly greenery in Wicked Plants - The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities. With gothic glee, she takes us through flowers, pods and leaves that tighten throats, paralyze nerves, induce hallucinations or seizures, and stop the heart.

"We have an idea that if it grows out of the ground, it must be good," she says. "It is good. But not to eat. The plant world produces ricin and strychnine, some of the most deadly poisons we know."

Wicked Plants is a stroll down a garden path of dread. Some of the most beloved and innocent plants in our own personal edens are villains at their core - lily of the valley, the sweetly perfumed harbinger of spring, and foxglove, the purple trumpets of July, are both toxic. Monkshood is not uncommon in Toronto gardens; all parts of the plant are dangerous and anyone handling it should wear gloves. A few bright berries of the fragrant daphne could kill a child.

There's a reason for these nasty habits - they are plants' defences against predators.

Some of these killers tempt hikers in woods or cottagers walking on country roads. Stewart can't understand those who heedlessly nibble unknown green sprigs or berries. "Why? Are you that hungry, you can't wait till you get home and get a sandwich? I think this is about respecting the power that nature has."

Stewart lives in Eureka, Calif., but you hear the melodious lilt of Texas in her voice. She's written three other books on the natural world and has her own poison garden with 30 specimens including mandrake and hemlock, fenced off to protect her roaming chickens.

Wicked Plants walks a line between informing readers about the perils of plants and camping up the darkest chapters in their history - section headings include "Botanical Crime Families" and "Weeds of Mass Destruction."

You'll want to know about the "Lawns of Death": Kentucky bluegrass can cause severe allergies, while the tender shoots of Johnson grass contain enough cyanide to kill a horse.

In the U.S., kudzu, also known as mile-a-minute vine because it grows so fast, covers millions of acres and causes hundreds of millions of dollars' damage, strangling trees and overrunning meadows. There's a website that shows cars and tractors overwhelmed by the plant.

"I wanted this book to be creepy enough to appeal to people who like murder mysteries," Stewart says. It has inspired a show on wicked plants at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. Closer to home, Montreal's Botanical Garden has a small, toxic-plant section that contains, among other specimens, jimson weed and red baneberry.

In her research, Stewart found plenty of examples of those stricken by poisonous plants. Frederick Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed Central Park, was nearly blinded by poison sumac. Some believe the strange behaviour of girls and women victimized by the mass hysteria of the Salem witch trials may have been caused by the toxic fungus ergot, which contaminates rye.

These fleurs du mal are all around us.

Stewart has seen castor beans growing on boulevards in Chicago, a city she notes has been aggressively greening itself and is on its way to becoming a botanical wonder. "They are big, beautiful, dramatic annuals, but contain ricin, a very deadly poison, often thought of a potential biological weapon." She grows castor beans in her own garden - only the seeds are deadly. "It's a very simple matter to pinch off the seed pods. It's not a big deal - it's not as if it's going to lunge out and force itself down your throat."

As for edible beans, the red kidney is perfectly fine - as long as you don't eat it undercooked or raw. It contains the compound phytohaemagglutinin, which can cause nausea and diarrhea.

Also in Chicago, Stewart spotted Datura stramonium, known as jimson weed, spilling out of window boxes in a public library.

She relays the story of how early settlers on Jamestown Island, Va., discovered the weed's poisonous powers. It was used decades later - by their descendants - to immobilize British troops at the start of the Revolutionary War. They slipped Datura into the soldiers' food and effected a colonial acid trip: Soldiers chased feathers through the air; some stripped naked and grinned like monkeys, according to one historian.

Stewart has seen oleander - a tropical plant grown as a houseplant in Toronto, but often brought outdoors in the summer - at the front doors of homes with small children.

"I've told them (oleander) could kill their kids; why not plant something else? Parents go to such great lengths to keep kids safe. I visit them and can't open cabinet doors or work the faucets. They cover over electrical outlets. Then there's this very tempting shrub at the front door."

She reports on two toddlers in California who were found dead in their cribs after chewing oleander leaves, and on a woman who tried to collect her husband's life insurance by adding oleander to his food.

Some 3,900 people in the U.S. are injured every year by poking around electrical outlets, while more than 68,000 are poisoned by plants, she says. The Ontario Poison Centre received 1,440 calls in the past 12 months from people alarmed by some plant-related illness. The nurses there often get calls about rhubarb leaves (they contain oxalic acid, which, if ingested, causes weakness, breathing difficulty and gastrointestinal problems), about the houseplant dieffenbachia (its sap can cause loss of speaking ability and even death), and about teenagers strung out on jimson weed.

(Make sure you know the names of the plants indoors and in your garden, says Heather Ferries, a nurse educator at the poison centre. It's not helpful to get a caller saying her child has eaten a plant with a green stem and leaves. Keep the planting tags, take a cutting from the plant to a nursery for identification, or compile a list of the names in a book at home.)

Stewart is surprised at people's reluctance to remove plants because they are living things. "I think that people who are serious, hardcore gardeners understand that a garden is an artificial creation, a human-made enterprise, and we can change it. We don't have to live with whatever is planted around us."

She used to unthinkingly pop unknown berries in her mouth, but has changed her ways since researching Wicked Plants. "I became a much more cautious person," she says. At first I started buying plants that were a little intoxicating - not illegal, but a little immoral. I thought I'd experiment. But the more cases I read about people rushed off to hospital in a coma, I decided, `No, thank you.'

"I'll stick to my martinis."

Source:
Leslie Scrivener
Jul 11, 2009 04:30 AM
Extreme botany: When plants attack!
http://www.thestar.com/article/664414

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