True Stories of Deadly Plants
I was walking through my backyard with my 4- and 6-year-olds in tow, and my son grabbed a tiny cherry tomato-like plant from a vine on the ground and said, "Mommy, tomatoes!" At first glance, I thought a tomato plant had decided to volunteer itself to live in my garden. At second glance, the leaves were thorny, and it didn't look like any tomato variety I had ever grown. I looked up the plant and found that it is indeed poisonous and should be removed with gloves and kept away from children, as the berries contain a poison. Even the leaves can cause irritation on the skin. As a mom, I realized I need to do a deep dive into dangerous plants, which led me down a rabbit hole of the history of poisonous plants.
Come dive into this unusual and sometimes creepy history that might even make you feel like the plants are trying to convince us to consume them.
Belladonna: The Beautiful Lady
The Elizabethans called it dwale, from an old word for stupor. The Venetians called it bella donna, the beautiful lady. Linnaeus, who had read his Greek, gave it the name we still use: Atropa, after Atropos, the Fate who holds the shears and cuts the thread.
Three names, three warnings, all meant to keep people away.
The kindest of its names is also the strangest, because there is nothing kind about the plant. The usual explanation is cosmetic. Women in Renaissance Italy are said to have put a weak preparation of the juice into their eyes, which widened the pupil and gave the face a dark, liquid, slightly startled look that was considered beautiful. The chemistry of it actually works (despite how ill advised it may be). Atropine, the alkaloid the plant is named for, relaxes the muscle that constricts the pupil. Your eye opens and stays open. Everything goes bright and blurred at once.
Which meant that for several centuries, the same plant sat in two completely different drawers. It was in the apothecary's cabinet as a medicine and inside ladies' cosmetic tables. It was also in the hedge behind the house, at child height, covered in sweet black fruit. As a mother, this is the most frightening part of this plant (there's nothing like having children to make you afraid of every plant and creature you come across).
Herbalists noticed this problem long before anyone could explain it. In 1578, Henry Lyte, translating the Flemish botanist Dodoens into English, told anyone growing it to fence it in so that nobody could be "enticed with the beautie of the fruite to eate thereof."
Banish It From Your Gardens
Twenty years after Lyte, John Gerard put the same warning in much blunter language, and he had a story to go with it.
Gerard was a barber-surgeon by trade, which in Elizabethan England meant something closer to a working medical man than a physician. What he really was, though, was a gardener. He kept a famous plot in Holborn and looked after the gardens of Lord Burghley, Queen Elizabeth's chief minister. In 1597 he published The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes, a thousand-page attempt to describe every plant an English person might meet. It made him the best-known plantsman in the country.
Three boys in Wisbech, in the Isle of Ely, ate the fruit. Two of them were dead within eight hours. The third was given honey and water and made to vomit again and again, and he lived. Gerard tells it plainly as a warning to parents when he said "banish it from your gardens and the use of it also, being a plant so furious and deadly."
Sadly it did not work as the abundant plant continued to spread. Three centuries later, in September 1916, three children were admitted to a London hospital after eating belladonna berries from a public garden. The gardener had not known what he was growing.
The Lady Who Made the Book
The plates you are looking at here come from a book published in Edinburgh in 1858, and the woman behind it is worth knowing about.
Charlotte Mary Yonge was thirty-five that year and already one of the most widely read novelists in Britain. Her Heir of Redclyffe had appeared in 1853 and for a while outsold Dickens and Thackeray. Louisa May Alcott thought enough of her to put one of her books into Little Women: when Jo March sits down to improve herself, the volume in her hands is Yonge's Daisy Chain.
Yonge's family did not consider it respectable for a woman to profit from her own writing. They agreed to let her publish on one condition, that she give the money away. So she did. The proceeds of The Heir of Redclyffe helped fit out a missionary schooner called the Southern Cross. The proceeds of The Daisy Chain went toward building a college in Auckland. She wrote roughly one hundred and sixty books over her life and kept very little of what they earned.
She also barely left home. She was born at Otterbourne in Hampshire in 1823 and died there in 1901, in the same village, having taught at the parish Sunday school for most of the years in between. She never married. She edited a magazine for young women for forty years. And somewhere in the middle of all that, working with a Scottish naturalist named Robert Mackenzie Stark, she assembled thirty-one hand-coloured double plates of the plant world for children.
Nine of them she devoted to describing poisonous plants.
What the Schoolbook Knew
The book is called The Instructive Picture Book, or, Lessons from the Vegetable World. The artist sat down and made those pictures lovely on purpose. Because the thing a child needs is not to be scared of nature, it is to be able to understand it. To know that the plant with the bruise-coloured bells and the cherry-black fruit is not the same as the plant with the harmless-looking red one.
That is really what four hundred years of these warnings have been for. Not fear, but knowledge. Lyte fencing his garden, Gerard telling the story of the Wisbech boys, a Sunday school teacher in Hampshire deciding that the green of a yew needle was worth getting exactly right for a six year old. All of them doing the same thing, which is handing the next person a way to recognise what they are looking at.
As my children get older, we'll be diving into the wild plants of our environment, and while we've already all been into the poison ivy this season, we're vigilant about not eating anything that we didn't plant in our garden with our own hands.
