We were talking about poisons at a book launch* last week and one of my learned colleagues mentioned that the traditional witches’ brew garden plants just aren’t as deadly as you might think. Is that the fault of an exaggeration of the plants’ toxicities or, as another writerly polymath suggested, improved health levels making people more likely to survive poisoning? I don’t know the answer, but it did get me thinking about (da da daaa!) PLANTS THAT KILL!
Being Australian I’m used to the notion that, at any given time, approximately 36% of my immediate environment is actively trying to kill me, but that’s mostly creepies and crawlies and slithery things** rather than large carnivores and plants. Not that some of the plants aren’t up to the task – anyone who has tangled with a Gympie Gympie*** is familiar with its charming brand of ‘god let me die now so the pain will end’.
The Dendrocnide moroides is also known as the stinger or suicide plant and arguably has the most painful sting of anything in the world. The recommended treatment is to wash the area with diluted hydrochloric acid (1:10) because, I guess, acid is preferable to this monster. It’s related to the giant stinging tree but has a more potent neurotoxin. Apparently, the pain can last for years…
Some of our continent’s nastiest inhabitants, though, are ornamental imports brought by early colonists. Like many children around the world, I recall being warned away from Oleanders and Angels Trumpets. The latter, Brugsmansia, has pretty flowers, the perfume of which can cause respiratory irritation and nausea in some people. They are closely related to Datura – Devils Trumpets – but the Brugsmansia’s flowers are pendulous rather than erect. Both types of ‘trumpet’ belong to the nightshade family.
The alkaloids in Brugs (as fans of the plants call them) will mess you up. Some people, looking for a natural high, have contemplated their choices (lick a cane toad**** or drink some trumpet tea) and opted for the tea. I’m definitely not recommending the former, but nasty things happen when you ingest trumpets belonging to devils or angels. Bad, bad trips – the hallucinogenic effects have been described as terrifying rather than pleasurable and in one case the ‘acute psychotic condition’ led to self-amputation of the tea drinker’s penis and tongue.
So that’s a no.
Having grown up in the subtropics, it wasn’t until I went to the UK that I saw a lot of the deadly plants that my reading of fairytales, the classics, fantasy fiction and historical non-fiction like Nicholas Culpeper’s Herbal had led me to believe would just about leap out and attack me. You know, the sort of classic witches’ weeds of deadly nightshade, hemlock and henbane, mandrake and monkshood, wormwood and foxglove.
I found it a little confronting to discover that the gardens of Edinburgh were a veritable pharmacopeia of death – atropine, aconite, digoxin, taxine and cicutoxin, just to name a few. Those lovely monkshood in the banner pic? Photographed in Edinburgh, as was this snowy graveyard yew.
But none of these plants, nasty as they are, can compete with (da,da,daaa!) the TREE of DEATH!
The manchineel (Hippomane mancinella) or manzanilla de la muerte, which means little apple of death, grows in and around the Caribbean. On some islands they put warning signs on the trees to let people know that the fruit, sap and leaves are highly toxic. (Check it out!) Just standing beneath one, when it rains, will cause skin blisters. I think Flaubert overstated the danger of the tree in Madame Bovary where he referred to its ‘poisonous shade’, but not by much.
Truth, as ever, is stranger than fiction. But it makes me think about how ludicrously nasty a fictional plant would have to be, just to compete with some of our world’s fabulous flora. And all of this really makes me want to get back to a short story I started writing about four months ago about malevolent apple trees. Not that I’ve gone all ‘hello, my pretty’ with poisoned fruit. Just those yellow and red stripes…that’s Nature’s warning, right? Like tigers and wasps.
Plus, I think doing some writing would be safer than a spot of gardening, all things considered.
*the book, City of Lies by Sam Hawke, features a family of poison tasters.
**and the sun, of course – mankind’s ancient enemy….
***much worse if you do this in Gympie, thereby cubing the level of your distress as well as running the additional risk of mercury poisoning.
****the Bufo marinus has hallucinogenic sweat. And is gross. You could not pay me enough to lick one.