Wicked Plants - Amy Stewart

   2009; 256 pages.  Full Title: Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Plants; Non-Fiction; Medical Reference.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    Hey, let’s get in touch with our hunter-gatherer side by going on a hike in the woods!

 

    It’ll be fun to commune with Mother Nature.  If we spot any berries on bushes along the way, we can give them a taste.  I hear the bright red ones are the best.  And wild berries can’t be harmful, since the bushes produce them to attract insects.  And the berries will pair well with any mushrooms we come across.

 

    We can take Fido and Rover along; they can chase sticks we throw and chew on them.  We can brew our own tea too.  I don’t know what a sassafras tree looks like, so we can just boil the leaves of any old tree and see what kind of taste develops.

 

    It would be really neat if we find some cactus plants as well.  I doubt they will turn out to be peyote, but we can always hope for some kind of hallucinatory plant that no one else has discovered yet.

 

    And just to be safe, I’ve brought along a handy reference book: Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart.  It’ll help us identify all the potentially-edible plants we come across, even though she seems to have one-word answer for all of our proposed tastings.

 

    DON’T!

 

What’s To Like...

    Wicked Plants is first and foremost a reference book, so (most of) the entries are listed in alphabetical order.  Amy Stewart gives 63 “things to be avoided” in the book.  A majority of them are individual plants, but there are also some “group” listings, with catchy titles such as “This Houseplant Could Be Your Last”, “Deadly Dinner”, and “Weeds of Mass Destruction”.

 

    The entries fall into one of seven categories, namely: Deadly, Illegal, Intoxicating, Dangerous, Painful, Destructive, and Offensive.  The “Deadly” category is by far the biggest.  Some of my favorite entries were: Deadly Nightshade, Coca, Marijuana, The Devil’s Bartender, Jimson Weed, and Killer Algae.

 

    I liked the format Amy Stewart uses:

Category

Plant Name (English)

Plant Name (Latin)

Introduction

Family, Habitat, Native To, Common Names

Main Text, including things like Usage Information, Chemistry, After-Effects

“Meet the Relatives”

 

    The book is laden with trivia.  I learned why you shouldn’t use potatoes if their skin has turned green (see below); and all how cyanobacteria spreads (aka “Blue-Green Algae”), which just happens to be a major plot thread in the next book I’m reading.  I enjoyed the section on the Venus Fly Trap (we had these in the hills where I grew up) and was surprised to learn that Bermuda Grass is highly allergenic.

 

    I found the “Illegal” and “Intoxicating” categories fascinating.  We get to read about Sigmund Freud’s delight after trying Cocaine; how Jimson Weed got its name; the mind-altering properties of Psylocybin (aka “magic mushroom, and yes, spellchecker spells it "psilocybin", but the author doesn't), and the properties of Khat, an important word to know in Scrabble because of its alternate spelling “qat”.  Sadly, the druggy-sounding “Cannabis Vodka” turned out to be rather disappointing.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.7/5 based on 1,704 ratings and 514 reviews.

    Goodreads: 3.80/5 based on 9,061 ratings and 1,235 reviews

 

Excerpts...

    POTATO.  Solanum tuberosum.  This member of the dreaded nightshade family contains a poison called solanine, which can bring on burning and gastrointestinal symptoms and even coma and death in rare cases.  Cooking a potato will kill most of the solanine in it, but if a potato has been exposed to the light long enough for its skin to turn green, that may be a sign of increased levels of solanine.  (loc. 512)

 

    British soldiers arrived to quell one of the first uprisings at the fledgling [Jamestown] colony, and the settlers remembered the toxic plant and slipped datura leaves into the soldiers’ food.

    The British soldiers did not die, but they did go crazy for eleven days, temporarily giving the colonists the upper hand.  According to an early historian, “One would blow a feather in the air; another would dart straws at it with much fury; and another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mows [grimaces] at them; a fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions.”  (loc. 770)

 

Kindle Details…

    Wicked Plants sells for $9.04 at Amazon.  The other two books in this set, The Drunken Botanist and Wicked Bugs, are priced at $10.82 and $9.99, respectively.  Amy Stewart has also penned a 7-book mystery series called “A Kopp Sisters Novel”; they go for $9.99 apiece.

 

The best advice for avoiding the nettle family is to resist the temptation to stroke an unfamiliar fuzzy or hairy leaf.  (loc. 821)

    It’s hard to nitpick about anything in Wicked Plants.  I only noted one typo (“southe stern” instead of “south eastern”), and I’m pretty sure that’s the printer’s fault.  There's a “screen expand” link for each entry, but the only thing it expands is the name of the plant.  I have a feeling it was meant to do more.

 

    Pliny the Elder is credited with claiming that “strains of henbane ‘trouble the braine’”, but I doubt he chose the old English spelling since he was writing in Latin.  But probably the source of this quote, which isn’t listed, was a medieval scribe.

 

    Really, my only disappointment is that “Hawaiian Baby Woodrose Seeds” are not included in the book.  I had an experience with them many decades ago, and they certainly qualify for the “Intoxicating” or “Painful” category, although in checking Wikipedia, they apparently haven't been declared “Illegal”.

 

    9 Stars.  The subtitle (“The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother”) refers to something called “White Snakeroot”, which, since it begins with the letter “w”, occurs late in the book, and really did kill Nancy Hanks Lincoln.