Episode 306: The Atlas of Deadly Plants

Get your copy of The Atlas of Deadly Plants

If you’re after a print copy, you can order one from your favourite bookshop of choice: there’s a list of useful links here.

Prefer to listen? I’ve got you! The Atlas of Deadly Plants will be available right now on my Patreon, and will soon be available on Audible and Spotify.

More info about the book

‘The beautifully designed and lavishly illustrated world tour of the 50 most poisonous plants and fungi on the planet,’ according to the press release! I delve into the stories and folklore behing these incredible species and explain how they grow in the wild, as well as how humans have harnessed them in numerous ways over the centuries. Expect murders, witchcraft, folklore and some very scary poisons!

The incredible illustrations in the book are courtsey of Alice Smith (@aliceshole on Instagram) and the foreword is written by Dr Sarah E Edwards.

Want to stock The Atlas of Deadly Plants in your shop? Drop me a line and I’ll put you in touch with my publisher!

Part one: introducing The Atlas of Deadly Plants

Transcript - part one

[0:21]Introduction to Deadly Plants

[0:15]Are you ready to get deadly? Yes, of course you are. It's On The Ledge Podcast and I'm Jane Perrone. Hello and welcome to a special series of mini episodes dedicated to my new book, Atlas of Deadly Plants, just in time for Halloween.

[0:48]Watcher, how are you doing, everybody? I know it's been a moment, but I'm back, not for good, but just for a little run of episodes, mini episodes dedicated to the Atlas of Deadly Plants, botanical tales of the world's most intoxicating, poisonous, and dangerous specimens written by me with a forward by Dr. Sarah E. Edwards and illustrated by Alice Smith. If you want to get your hands on a copy, then do check the show notes where you'll find all the links. And the good news is this time I have made sure that this book will be available wherever you are. So if you are in North America, you should be able to order this from any of your normal book suppliers and hopefully in other parts of the world too. It's published by Greenfinch and you should be able to order it from your local bookshop of choice. Please do that and support your local indie bookshops. But if you're the kind of person who likes to listen to stuff rather than read stuff, there's also an audiobook version available. It's going to be available on my patreon so if you are a patreon subscriber at the legend or superfan level you will have access to this you can also get it on audible or spotify so.

[2:16]Please do support this book if you can in any way, shape or form. It was so much fun to write. And in each of these episodes over the next seven days, I'm going to give you a little insight into the book. Today's main course will be me reading the introduction to the book. So if you want to find out roughly what this is all about, this is a great place to start. So what is an atlas of deadly plants? Well, as the name suggests, it's a geographical guide. So we've split the world into regions and covered plants from each of those regions to a total of 50. There are 50 plants and in fact some fungi too in this book. And when it comes to the definition of deadly, we've not been too strict about this. We're talking about plants that will do you harm, will make you feel like death warmed up, if not actually killing you in some cases.

[3:20]So we've got everything from poison ivy to tobacco to peyote to white briny to black henbane. So if you want to find out about how these plants grow in the wild, the stories and folklore that have become attached to them over the ages, how they've been used as poisons, as medicines, as raw materials by us human beings, this is the book for you. And each of the 50 plants is accompanied by a gorgeous, absolutely gorgeous, I'm telling you right now, absolutely gorgeous picture, an illustration by an illustrator called Alice Smith. They're very gothic.

[4:04]If you are a tattoo type person, you might be inspired by this book. So that's what you get if you buy a print edition, some gorgeous illustrations as well. So I guess without any further ado I'm going to let you have a little taster of the introduction to the book this is the introduction that I've recorded for the audiobook and if you want more more more then skip on over to the show notes and get yourself a copy ordered I would love to have your support I know many of you were absolutely incredible in supporting Legends of the Leaf I think you're going to enjoy this book just as much. So please, if you have got a copy, leave a review. It means so much to have reviews on wherever you've ordered your book, whether it's audio or print.

[4:59]I love to hear from you. So do drop me a line if you want to tell me something that you liked about the book or tell me about a time that you were poisoned by a plant. It's on the ledge podcast at gmail.com.

[5:29]Author's Introduction One of my earliest childhood memories is of standing on a footpath, my face wet with tears, wondering if I was about to die. I'd wandered away while playing outside and couldn't quite remember how to get home. It was late summer in England, and the path linking two suburban streets was a green tunnel created by the canopies of the trees in the neighbouring gardens. I ate some tiny, shiny black berries dangling temptingly overhead, but seconds later it dawned on me that I had only the haziest idea of what they were, or if they were, in fact, deadly poisonous. A kindly passer-by asked what was wrong, and I pointed to the berries that I had snacked on. She reassured me that they were elderberries and harmless, and sent me back down the alleyway towards home.

[6:30]She was wrong about the berries. While elderberries, from the common elder tree, Sambucus nigra, are no deadly nightshade or foxglove, they do contain chemical compounds called cyanogenic glycosides, which our guts process into hydrogen cyanide. In small amounts, this induces nausea and in larger quantities can involve a trip to the emergency ward I felt fine as I toddled back home I'd only eaten a few berries after all I have since consumed elderberries many times But always make sure to cook them first, which renders them safe to eat.

[7:10]I only remembered this incident years later when researching the chemical make-up of elderberries for an article I was working on.

[7:18]It reminded me of two key points to keep in mind when considering whether a plant is poisonous or not, especially if you plan to eat it. The first is Paracelsus's saying, the dose makes the poison. You may not have heard of Paracelsus, a 16th century Swiss physician, but you will have grasped the practical implications of his words by the time you reach adulthood. Got a headache? You might take one or two painkiller tablets, but you know that taking 50 of them won't make the pain 50 times better. It will land you in hospital. It is the same with plants, which is why it is always worth eating any new foods in small quantities before you make them a regular part of your diet. The second point is this. Never rely on someone else's knowledge to identify a plant for you. The old forager's joke that everything is edible once isn't so funny when you start feeling a little odd a few minutes after eating a salad of leaves you thought looked like wild garlic. One of the key things I've learned through researching and writing this book is that many, many plant poisoning cases start with a forager mistaking a plant, any plant, for wild garlic.

[8:44]Plant poisonings as depicted in film and television are swift. No sooner has the deadly draught or dish passed the lips of the victim than they are writhing on the ground and stone dead soon after. The harsh reality is that most plant poisons take hours or days to do their work, with the initial symptoms often masquerading as other conditions, such as food poisoning. Now that I have scared you half to death, let me reassure you that just 5% of human poisoning cases reported to poison control centres in North America and Europe relate to plants. In today's world, we spend a lot less time interacting with plants than our forebears. And children, who usually account for the majority of poisoning patients who pitch up at hospital, spend far less time playing without parental supervision outside the home than in the past, unlike in the 1970s and 80s when I was busy snacking on raw elderberries. Today, we are far more likely to be poisoned by household chemicals, gases such as carbon monoxide and drugs, either legal or illicit, than by plants. I hope this does not put you off learning more about plants, poisonous or otherwise, because the more you come to know about a species, the more fascinating it becomes.

[10:09]From medieval scammers peddling white briny roots to the Roman soldiers felled by rhododendron-poisoned honey, the poisonous plants in this book will surprise, delight and horrify you by equal turns.

[10:24]Whole books can, and indeed have, been written about some of the species featured here, but I hope that this particular book will, like all good atlases, inspire you to plot your next foray into the fascinating realms of the plant kingdom.

[10:41]A warning. The information in this book about plant species and plant-derived medicines is included for reference purposes only. It is not intended to be used either as a guide for accurately identifying plant species in the wild or as a substitute for professional medical advice or treatment. You should consult a qualified healthcare professional on any matters requiring diagnosis or medical attention, and before using any plant-derived medicines.

[11:32]A Cautionary Note I do hope you enjoyed that and i'll be back tomorrow to talk about something from the book specifically the ancient anesthetic known as dwale so tune in tomorrow for more from the atlas of deadly plants bye.

My new book The Atlas of Deadly Plants is out this week, published by Greenfinch, so I thought I’d celebrate by offering up a series of mini-podcast episodes digging into some of the themes and facts from the book - just in time for Halloween!

In this part I’ll be telling you a little about the book and giving you the chance to listen to the introduction so you can really get an idea of what it is all about!

First up - the vital info…

Part two: a TOXIC tree

Transcript - part two

[0:15]Hello and welcome to part two of the On The Ledge podcast, Atlas of Deadly Plants, series of minisodes, out just in the run-up to Halloween, just to get you in the spooky mood.

[0:30]Welcome to Atlas of Deadly Plants

[0:31]And in this amuse-bouche of an episode, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about Taxus baccata aka the European yew, a tree that we associate very much with cemeteries and churchyards we're going to find out why.

[0:51]First a little reminder if you want to listen to this book it's now up on my patreon so go and have a look you can buy it there and if you are a legend or a super fan you can go and listen to all 50 plants it's going up on Spotify and Audible in the next few days fingers crossed, unfortunately I don't yet have the rights to use the cover so it's got a temporary cover on there but if you search for my name in the next few days it should pop up and if you want to buy a copy of the print version then it should be available in all your local bookshops as well as the usual online outlets. So let's get cracking on with talking about a poisonous tree, the European yew. I start the chapter on yew talking about an ancient wooden spear dating back to about 420,000 years ago that was discovered back in 1911 in Clacton-on-Sea, a well-known seaside resort in Essex in England and it's this is considered by some to be one of the oldest wooden artefacts in the world.

[2:09]Already back in Paleolithic times, we were using you as a weapon material. And that's important because this is not an association that goes away. If you are a student of Shakespeare and you've read the play Richard II.

[2:29]You is described as double fatal in Richard II. Why? Well, because at the time it was well known that you, as well as being a poison, It was also a wood that was vital because it was the raw material for the longbow. So you needed a really strong and elastic wood to make a good longbow. And yew was it. And that is apparently one of the reasons why there aren't as many yew trees as there used to be across Europe, because we cut so many down to make bows over history. A little bit of botany here. So ewes are what we call a dioecious species, which means that a tree is either a male tree or a female tree. So the female trees are the ones that produce the arils, these bright red fruits, each with the very, very toxic seed inside.

[3:24]Birds and badgers like eating these, but the seed passes through them and then obviously helps make a new plant. The aral itself is not toxic although the seed inside is very toxic the male trees on the other hand well if you've ever passed by a ewe in spring and just been attacked by a massive cloud of yellow pollen well that is how you know that you're encountering a male tree because those the ones that release the huge amounts of pollen yeah not good if you suffer from hay fever.

[3:59]Why do they turn up in churchyards? Well, there's so much association, so much folklore around the you as a tree of death and resurrection. So they're very intimately connected with funerals.

[4:15]And we don't really know. There's no one reason why these trees were planted in churchyards. One idea, this one's a bit out there, but people thought that the vapours released by dead bodies would be neutralised by the yew tree. Also, it may have just been a practical thing that this sort of very sturdy tree protected the church from storms. We also hear sometimes that by having poisonous ewes, it would stop farmers from letting their livestock into the churchyard to have a nice feed on the grass.

[4:56]One other one just to throw into the mix. At one point before we could get hold of palms in the UK, people used yew branches. So having a nice convenient yew tree was another reason to have one planted in your churchyard. Again, it's a symbol of death and resurrection. One final theory on the yew trees in churchyard was that they were there before the church. So the idea that the Druids who came before Christianity obviously saw yew trees as a sacred tree, had them planted in their places of worship and then Christianity came along and supplanted those places of worship with churches and the yew trees remained. [5:40]How Yew Trees Can Kill [5:36]So this is a tree that's very ancient and venerable in many ways. How is a yew tree going to kill you if you consume it rather than being killed by a yew longbow? Well the plant is full of taxene alkaloids which attack the heart basically and cause heart to malfunction and go arrhythmic and you die if you take enough of it so yes it's intimately connected with the heart we don't get poisoned very much by you these days although it is worth bearing in mind that if you have small children they might be attracted to those little red berries so caution is required.

[6:19]So if you want to read more about yew trees, do check out the Atlas of Deadly Plants. The illustration on this one I particularly love. There is a skull in there. There is a heart and there is a longbow. So you've got all the main components of this story in a beautiful illustration. And I just think it's such an amazing tree as well. If you ever go into a churchyard, have a look for a yew tree. There are some really ancient ones around the country in here in the UK. And if you Google ancient yews, you'll come up with lots of examples of ancient yew trees that you can go and visit and make a link with our ancestors. So I hope that's whetted your appetite for a little bit more of the Atlas of Deadly Plants. I'll be back tomorrow with news of a competition where you can win one of five copies of the book. See you then. Bye. Thank you.

In this mini-episode I talk about Taxus baccata, the European yew, which has a long history of being used as a poison, but it’s also been used since prehistory as a raw material for weapons. If you want to learn more about the Clacton spear, one of the oldest wooden artefacts in the world, check this paper out.

The Clacton Spear. Photograph: Geni

Jane PerroneThe Atlas of Deadly PlantsComment