Book Review/Wicked Plants
Wicked Plants
A book of botanical atrocities
By Amy Stewart
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Hardbound $18.95
To be released May 2009
By BILL DUNCAN
When my son Barry, now 52, was under a year old, I was working for a morning newspaper in Los Angeles and had just bought a hilltop home in Fullerton, Calif.
It was near an orange grove and mined with gopher burrows. I read that the Castor Bean
plant would poison gophers, so I planted six of them near my patio. Actually, as landscaping plants go, these broad leafed, tree-like plants that can grow ten feet tall were a beautiful addition to my back forty.
That is, if that were the only story I had to tell. One day I was babysitting with my infant son on the patio when I noticed he was eating something – a castor bean. I knew the plant was deadly for gophers, so after I had raked castor bean residue from his mouth, I called the family doctor. He seemed alarmed and told me to get the child to the hospital immediately.
When his stomach was pumped and the doctor said there was enough residue of the castor bean to have been fatal. Needless to say, the castor bean landscaping went to the burn pile. Since that time I have read much about poisonous plants, but never in such detail as favorite garden writer, Amy Stewart of Eureka, Calif. describes in her book, “Wicked Plants.” The book will be released on May 5 of this year. I received an advance reader copy since I have previously reviewed Stewart’s fascinating array of garden books, beginning with “From The Ground Up,” about her discovery of gardening, then “The Earth Moved,” the remarkable story of earthworms and more recently, “Flower Confidential.” If you garden, Amy Stewart’s unique writing will enhance your own gardening skills.
You may think, why would anyone want to read about wicked plants? It could save your life and surely the pain and suffering such plants as the castor bean can cause even when they offer a way to rid your garden of gophers. In an on-line question and answer interview, Stewart says:
“I was fascinated with the idea that there are evildoers in the plant kingdom and that horticulture has a dark side.”
Her research discovered that throughout history wicked plants have been used as murder weapons and that plants inflict pain and even destroy other plants in particularly diabolical ways. “These are the plants you do not want to meet in a dark alley,” she said. Her research also discovered that many of the plants she writes about are familiar garden plants like daphne and oleander. She visited Alnwich Poison Garden in Northumberland, England, the location of Hogwarts in the first Harry Potter films, the apothecary garden in the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and the USDA poisonous plant research laboratory in Utah to authenticate her research.
One of the valuable adjuncts to the book, is her inclusion of plants that cause allergic reactions, like the pepper tree that can cause of skin rash equal to poison ivy and produces an oil that can vaporize and can cause people to develop asthma just from being nearby. The juniper, she said, is a serious, but overlooked source of allergens. Even Bermuda grass is allergenic.
You can’t live in Oregon without being familiar with poison oak. Stewart says poison oak is not an oak and is not poisonous. Neither is poison ivy or poison sumac. But each plant does produce an oil, called urushiol, that in itself is not toxic, but most people are highly allergic to it. Oddly, only humans are bothered by exposure to urushoil, but woe the pet owner whose dog wallows in a patch of poison oak and then rubs up against its owner.
Whether or not you are a gardener, Stewart provides the reader with an interesting compendium of what may be lurking in the backyard that could kill, maim, intoxicate and otherwise be just be wicked plants
(Bill Duncan can be reached by writing to P.O. Box 812, Roseburg, OR 97470)