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 think that we all benefit from spending more time in nature - but we should also understand its power. I didn't write this book to scare people away from the outdoors. But someday, the plant kingdom's dark side may make itself known to you. You can hike for miles and never encounter the coyotillo shrub, whose berries cause a slow but deadly paralysis. You can garden for years without ever suffering the ill effects of a plant like monkshood, whose cheerful blue flowers conceal a toxin that brings on death by asphyxiation. And when a baby comes home, we rush to add safety caps to electrical outlets but ignore the houseplant in the kitchen and the shrub by the front door - this in spite of the fact that 3,900 people are injured annually by electrical outlets, while 68,847 are poisoned by plants.

We'll brew a medicinal tea from unrecognizable bark and leaves that a friend passes along, assuming that anything natural must be safe. We would never pick up a discarded coffee cup from the sidewalk and drink from it, but on a hike we'll nibble unfamiliar berries as if they had been placed there for our appetites alone. Innocent? This is how Giovanni viewed the luxuriant vegetation below his window, and it is how most of us approach our gardens and the plants we encounter in the wild: with a kind of naïve trust.

The old man's demeanor in the presence of his shrubs and vines 'was that of one walking among malignant influences, such as savage beasts, or deadly snakes, or evil spirits, which, should he allow them one moment of license, would wreak upon him some terrible fatality.' The story's hero, young Giovanni, watched from a window and found it most disturbing 'to see this air of insecurity in a person cultivating a garden, that most simple and innocent of human toils.' In his 1844 story 'Rappaccini's Daughter,' Nathaniel Hawthorne described an elderly doctor who tended a mysterious walled garden of poisonous plants. Within the plant kingdom lurk unfathomable evils. Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical AtrocitiesĪ tree sheds poison daggers a glistening red seed stops the heart a shrub causes intolerable pain a vine intoxicates a leaf triggers a war.

Wicked plants by amy stewart