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A readable and well-told tale filled with color, sensitivity, humor and plenty of research.
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Unfathomable Evils
WICKED PLANTS:
The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities
By Amy Stewart
223 pp. Algonquin $18.95
Reviewed by Julie McGuire
A tree sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed stops the heart; a shrub causes intolerable pain; a vine intoxicates; a leaf triggers a war. Within the plant kingdom lurk unfathomable evils.
If I decide to forego life as a respectable citizen and opt instead for a life of crime, I’ll be fortunate to live in the 21st century, where my punishment would be decided by a jury of my peers. Far worse to be tried in the West African criminal justice system of the 1500s, where one’s fate might be determined by a bean. The system was known as “trial by ordeal.” The “accused would swallow the bean, and what happened next would determine the outcome of the trial. If he vomited the bean, he was innocent, and if he died, he was guilty and got what he deserved.”
Amy Stewart’s delightful guidebook to all plants painful, illegal, intoxicating, and deadly—Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities—is filled with hundreds of similar tidbits. Did you know that the leaves of a rhubarb plant contain a particularly toxic acid which can cause all sorts of gastrointestinal problems, and “even coma and death in rare circumstances”? I wish I’d known that when I was forced to eat rhubarb pie. Or that marijuana, now illegal in most countries, was once sold as candy in Manhattan and was known as “Arabian Gunje of Enchantment”?
Even common household plants can be deadly. The poinsettia gets plenty of bad press during the holidays though it is “not nearly as toxic as its reputation would lead one to believe.” Beware, however, the ficus and rubber trees:
[T]he latex from these plants can provoke severe allergic reactions. One case history describes a woman who developed anaphylactic shock and other frightening symptoms that disappeared promptly after her ficus tree was removed.
And be warned that beans are more than just the “musical fruit.” Undercook the kidney bean and you run the risk of consuming too much phytohaemagglutinin, which can cause severe nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea.
Wicked Plants is a book to be shared. My best friend and I sat on her couch picking random pages and oohing and ahhing at the nuggets of information we were gleaning about all matters botanical. And my sons got a kick out of finding out as much as they could to use in their arsenal; there’s plenty in Wicked Plants that provides opportunity for children to try and get out of eating their vegetables. The book is also ideal for a quiet cover-to-cover read while curled on the couch. With accompanying sketches, anecdotal stories, and encyclopedic information such as habitat, family, and common names, Wicked Plants is part guidebook, encyclopedia, and story.
Amy Stewart, author of the bestselling Flowers Confidential: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful in the Business of Flowers, is a nature lover. She also understands its power:
I didn’t write this book to scare people away from the outdoors. Quite the opposite is true. I think that we all benefit from spending more time in nature—but we should also understand its power. I live on the rugged northern California coast, and every summer the Pacific Ocean sneaks up behind a family enjoying a day at the beach and claims a life...I love the ocean, but I never turn my back on it. Plants deserve the same kind of guarded respect. They can nourish and heal, but they can also destroy.
I admit that it was the cover of Wicked Plants that caught my eye—I was skeptical of its contents. But I was hooked with the first page. Stewart is funny, her writing is lively, and the anecdotes she relays are compelling. Despite its deadly reputation, I’ve always loved the sound of the name belladonna—a member of the nightshade family; just rubbing against the plant can have devastating consequences. But Italian women once dropped “mild tinctures of deadly nightshade into their eyes to dilute their pupils, which they thought made them more alluring.” Belladonna means beautiful woman in Italian. Cashews are also a member of this “botanical crime family.” Setting a cashew on fire produces a noxious smoke that burns the lungs.
Would you care to know which weed killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother? I’ll let the reader find out. Far be it from me to spoil the fun.
Julie McGuire, fiction editor of The Internet Review of Books, is a paralegal. Her personal essays and poems have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor and several small periodicals. She and her family live in Virginia.
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