Wicked Plants (20 page)

They poured strychnine in his cup
And shook to see him drink it up:
They shook, they stared as white’s their shirt:
Them it was their poison hurt.
—I tell the tale that I heard told.
Mithridates, he died old.

In
The Count of Monte Cristo
Alexandre Dumas writes of brucine, another poison found in the seed of the strychnine tree, and suggests that after taking minute amounts and gradually building up a tolerance, “at the end of a month, when drinking water from the same carafe, you would kill the person who drank with you, without your perceiving, otherwise than from slight inconvenience, that there was any poisonous substance mingled with this water.”

Meet the Relatives
     
Strychnos toxifera
bark can be boiled down and used as an arrow poison.
S. potatorum
is used in India to purify water by killing harmful microbes.

CERBERA ODOLLAM

The humid, brackish lagoons of the Kerala backwaters on the southwestern coast of India play host to lion-tailed macaques, Malabar giant squirrels, and a race of small but sturdy goats called Nilgiri tahrs. Here, in the low-lying waterways populated by vipers, pythons, and stinging catfish, grows
Cerbera odollam
, the suicide tree. Its narrow, dark green leaves resemble those of its cousin, the common oleander. Sprays of starry white flowers release a perfume as sweet as jasmine. The fleshy, green fruits are like small, unripe mangoes, except that they conceal a nasty surprise: the seeds’ white nut meat contain enough cardiac glycosides to stop the heart within three to six hours.

The advantages of such a powerful natural resource are not lost on the locals. The suicide rate in Kerala is about three times India’s average, with about one hundred Keralites attempting suicide, and twenty-five to thirty succeeding, every day. Poisoning is a popular method, preferred by 40 percent
of the despondent. Women in particular favor a dessert of mashed
odollam
nut mixed with jaggery, an unrefined sugar drawn from palm sap, as their final meal. However, the nut’s bitter taste is also easily concealed in one of the popular local curries, which are usually served with coconut and rice.

Because the symptoms of
odollam
poisoning resemble that of a heart attack, the seeds have been used as a murder weapon. In 2004 a team of French and Indian scientists conducted liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry analyses to prove that many of those who had died under mysterious circumstances had actually been fed
odollam
by some homicidal acquaintance.

The genus
Cerbera
is named after Cerberus, the hound of Hades from Greek mythology, a vicious three-headed dog with a snake for a tail. He guarded the gates to hell, keeping the dead perpetually trapped inside and preventing the living from entering. But its success as an instrument of suicide is what earned the tree its common name.

“To the best of our knowledge,” the scientists analyzing the forensic data wrote, “no plant in the world is responsible for as many deaths by suicide as the
odollam
tree.”

Meet the Relatives
     
Cerbera
is a cousin of the poisonous oleander. The blossoms of
C. manghas
resemble plumeria. While all the trees and shrubs in the
Cerbera
genus are fragrant and beautiful, they will nonetheless kill you. Even smoke from the burning wood is considered dangerous.

Flesh-eating plants know how to make the best out of a bad situation. Many of them live in bogs and wetlands where nutrition is scarce, so they have developed ingenious ways to trap living creatures for their dinner.

Tiny plants that live in damp soil and water and suck tiny insects and water into bubblelike traps when their trigger hairs are touched. The traps reset themselves within about thirty minutes, making them extraordinarily voracious plants. Some species of bladderworts are large enough to eat mosquito larvae and tadpoles.

Petite, violetlike flowers belie this plant’s carnivorous nature. The leaves exude a slippery ooze that lures fruit flies and gnats to their death.
Digestive enzymes excreted by the leaves break down the bodies of the insects, leaving nothing but empty carcasses around the plant.

Perhaps the most familiar carnivorous plant and easy to grow as a houseplant. Their trap leaves stay open and excrete a sweet nectar that attracts insects. Once a fly wanders inside, the trap springs closed. Glands on the insides of the leaves begin to release digestive juices that drown the doomed bug. It can take over a week for a Venus flytrap to devour its prey, and it may only eat a few bugs in its life. Although people can force a trap to close by running a finger along it, carnivorous plant enthusiasts consider this rude.

Showiest of all carnivorous plants, growing up to a foot tall and producing gorgeous, otherworldly blooms. Americans will recognize the native Sarraceniaceae family, which includes a number of tall, flutelike, bog-dwelling plants with vivid red and white patterns. Insects wander into the flute of the pitcher plant, attracted to the nectar it produces, and drown in the digestive juices that fill the lower regions of the plant. These are sometimes grown as houseplants; it is possible to perform an autopsy on a well-fed specimen by cutting one trumpet-shaped leaf lengthways, exposing a ghastly mass grave of dead flies.

Plants in the
Nepenthes
genus are also referred to as pitcher plants, but they function a little differently. The plants, which thrive in the jungles of Borneo but are also found throughout Southeast Asia, produce climbing, vinelike stems and cup-shaped flowers that hang from the vine and lure prey. Some of them can hold a quart of digestive fluids.
Nepenthes
generally feed upon ants and other small bugs, but they’ve been known to indulge in a larger meal from time to time. In 2006 visitors to the Jardin Botanique de Lyon in France complained about a nasty smell in the conservatory. The staff investigated, and found a partially digested mouse inside a large specimen of
Nepenthes truncata.

Climbing vines that produce bizarre flowers that vaguely resemble pipes, which is how they got their other common name, Dutchman’s pipe. The Greeks looked at the flower and saw something else: a baby emerging from the birth canal. At that time, plants were often used to treat ailments of the body parts they most closely resembled. Birthwort was given to women to help with difficult labor, but the vine is very poisonous and carcinogenic. It certainly would have killed more women than it helped.

Birthwort lures flies with its strong scent and sticky flowers, but it only traps the flies long enough to make sure they get covered with pollen. The sticky hairs wither, freeing the flies so they can go pollinate other plants.

NICOTIANA TABACUM

A leaf so toxic that it has taken the lives of ninety million people worldwide; so potent that it can kill through skin contact alone; so addictive that it fueled a war against Native Americans; so powerful that it led to the establishment of slavery in the American South; and so lucrative that it spawned a global industry worth over $300 billion.

This opportunistic little plant contains the alkaloid nicotine that wards off insects. Nicotine has an even more useful function from the plant’s perspective: it is so addictive that humans have been persuaded to grow it in mass quantity. Today tobacco occupies 9.8 million acres around the globe and continues to take 5 million lives a year, making it one of the world’s most powerful and deadly plants. Some 1.3 billion people around the world hold this plant between their trembling fingers every day.

Nicotiana
cultivation began in the Americas and dates back to 5000 BC. There is evidence that Native Americans were smoking the leaves two thousand years ago, but it did not spread to the rest of the world until Europeans discovered the practice when they arrived in America. Within a century, tobacco had migrated
to India, Japan, Africa, China, Europe, and the Middle East. The leaves themselves, and later “tobacco notes” attesting to the quality of a tobacco crop, were used as legal tender in Virginia. America’s slave trade was born out of a need for more field hands to bring in a profitable tobacco harvest. People didn’t just smoke it; they also believed it could cure migraines, ward off the plague, and ironically, treat coughs and cancer.

But smoking wasn’t embraced by everyone, even in the early days. In 1604 King James I called it “loathsome” and said that it was “harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs.” His statement was proven correct time and again over the next four hundred years, but tobacco use only grew.