Wicked Plants (5 page)

Often sold as an ornamental pepper plant, it is actually more closely related to deadly nightshade. All parts of the plant contain an alkaloid that can bring on weakness, drowsiness, nausea and vomiting, and heart problems.

ATROPA BELLADONNA

Professor and plant researcher Henry G. Walters speculated in 1915 about the potential for crossbreeding carnivorous and poisonous plants. He believed that if a poisonous plant had “the semimuscular system possessed by the carnivorous plants, it would be more dangerous than the cholera.” Dr. Walters declared that plants were capable of love and that they had memories, implying that they might also hold a grudge as lovers do. The deadly nightshade, he believed, was filled with hatred.

Although the entire plant is poisonous—just rubbing up against it can raise pustules on the skin—the blackberries are the plant’s most tempting feature. A Virginia farmer named Charles Wilson lost his children to those berries in 1880. The youngsters’ terse obituary suggests an agonizing weekend: “The first and youngest died last Thursday, the second, on Sunday night, and the third, and only remaining child, on Monday.”

Even today, tales of deadly nightshade poisoning appear in the medical literature. An elderly woman turned up at the hospital
every fall in a kind of psychosis; doctors were unable to trace the cause of her hallucinations, delusions, and headaches. After several days, the symptoms would subside on their own. Finally, her daughter brought in a handful of berries from a shrub growing near her house. She had been snacking on deadly nightshade every autumn when the berries grew ripe but somehow managed to escape a fatal poisoning.

This is far from the only case: A couple earned their place in medical history by baking a pie of nightshade berries, mistaking them for the much more edible bilberries. In Turkey, a review of nightshade poisoning found that forty-nine children were sickened over a six-year period. Most ate the berries themselves out of curiosity, but at least one child was fed nightshade by his parents in the mistaken hope that it would treat his diarrhea.

Deadly nightshade performs its dark magic with the help of an alkaloid called atropine, which causes rapid heartbeat, confusion, hallucinations, and seizures. The symptoms are so unpleasant that atropine is sometimes added to potentially addictive painkillers to keep patients from getting hooked. Medical students memorize this simple mnemonic trick to help them recognize the signs of poisoning: “Hot as a hare, blind as a bat, dry as a bone, red as a beet, and mad as a hatter.” “Madness” in this case refers to meaningless speech, a sign of deadly nightshade poisoning.

The herbaceous perennial is found across Europe, Asia, and North America, where it flourishes in damp, shady spots. It grows to about three feet tall, producing pointed, oval-shaped leaves and
purplish brown tubular flowers. From these flowers the bright black berries emerge, beginning as hard green fruit that ripen to red, finally reaching their full dark glory in the fall.

Early physicians mixed up a potent brew of deadly nightshade, hemlock, mandrake, henbane, opium, and other herbs as a surgical anesthetic. Atropine still has medicinal uses today and has been administered as an antidote to poisoning from nerve gas and pesticide exposure.

Italian women dropped mild tinctures of deadly nightshade into their eyes to dilate their pupils, which they thought made them more alluring. The name “belladonna” may come from this practice; it means “beautiful woman,” but the term might also originate from
buona donna
, a medieval witch doctor who treated the indigent with mysterious potions.

Atropa
comes from one of the three Fates of Greek mythology. Each Fate had a role in determining human destiny. Lachesis measured the thread of destiny at birth; Clotho spun the thread, controlling one’s destiny; and then, at the end, Atropos brought death at the time and manner of her choosing. Milton remembered her this way:

Comes the blind Fury with the abhorrèd shears,
And slits the thin-spun life.

Meet the Relatives
   Member of the large and unruly Solanaceae family, which includes henbane, mandrake, datura, and the spicy Habanero chile pepper.

ZIGADENUS VENENOSUS, OTHERS

Several species of death camas thrive in meadows across the western United States. They are bulb plants with strappy, grasslike leaves and clusters of starry flowers in shades of pink, white, or yellow. The entire plant contains toxic alkaloids, and although the level of toxins may vary between species, it is safest to assume that they are all highly poisonous. Eating any part of the plant or the bulb will cause drooling or frothing at the mouth, vomiting, extreme weakness, an irregular pulse, and confusion and dizziness. In cases of severe poisoning, the final symptoms include seizures, coma, and death.

Death camas poisoning is a serious problem for livestock. Sheep tend to be drawn to the plant, especially in the early spring when there isn’t anything else to eat. If the ground is wet, they are often able to pull up the entire plant. There is no treatment for animals who have been sickened, and usually they are simply found dead.

Dietitian and food historian Elaine Nelson McIntosh recently discovered that death camas might have played a role in the terrible illnesses that members of the Lewis and Clark expedition faced. In September 1805 the group passed through the Bitterroot Mountains, a particularly difficult range of the Rockies. They were already desperately low on food and suffering from a variety of nutrition related ailments, including dehydration, sore eyes, rashes, boils, and wounds that would not heal. On September 22 the group managed to obtain some food from the Nez Perce tribe. It included dried fish and the roots of a similar plant, blue camas
(Camassia
spp.), both of which the men had eaten before with no problem.

Members of the group were beset with violent illness and suffered from diarrhea and vomiting. Lewis himself was seriously ill for two weeks. Dr. McIntosh believes that the men may have been inadvertently poisoned by eating death camas instead of the edible blue camas. The flowers would not have been in bloom at the time, making it difficult to distinguish the two, and even local Indians familiar with the bulbs could have made an honest mistake. The expedition came to a halt while the men recovered. Eventually they staggered on, facing a winter in which they would be forced to eat their dogs and take their chances with the roots of other unfamiliar plants.

Meet the Relatives
   Once classified in the lily family, death camas is now grouped into a family with other wild bulbs, many of them poisonous. Relatives include false hellebore
(Veratrum album)
and trillium
(Trillium
spp.).

What do corn, potatoes, beans, and cashews have in common? They can all be poisonous under the right circumstances. Some of the world’s most important food crops contain toxic compounds that require them to be cooked or combined with other foods to make them safe. Some, like the grass pea, have earned a world wide reputation for turning a famine into an even more tragic catastrophe.

Also called chickling vetch, this pea has been a dietary staple in the Mediterranean, Africa, India, and parts of Asia for centuries. Like most legumes, it is an excellent source of protein, but it has one serious drawback: it contains a neurotoxin called beta-N-oxalyl-diamino propionic acid, or beta-ODAP. The first symptom of beta-ODAP poisoning, or lathyrism, is a weakening of the legs. Eventually, the toxin kills nerve cells and victims become paralyzed from the waist down. Without treatment, they will die.

How has this pea remained such a popular ingredient in flours, porridges, and stews? If they are soaked for a long time in water or fermented in breads or pancakes, they pose little risk. Grass peas are one of the few food crops that can survive a serious drought. People are then left with little else to eat—and not enough water to soak the peas in.

Hippocrates warned that people who “ate peas continuously became impotent in the legs.” Today one of the great tragedies of famines in places like Ethiopia and Afghanistan is that the high-protein pea is typically reserved for men to give them strength so that they can feed their families. Instead, it has the opposite effect, reducing them to crawling on their knees (and as one report noted, “Wheelchairs aren’t an option for most lathyrism sufferers, as they tend to live in dirt-floor huts”). Even if the drought receded and they stopped eating the peas, they might still be disabled for life.

Francisco Goya depicted the ravages of lathyrism in his circa 1810 aquatint print called
Gracias a la Almorta
, or “Thanks to the Grass Pea.” He was portraying a grueling outbreak that occurred during Spain’s war for independence against Napoleon’s army.

The grass pea resembles a sweet pea. It is a climbing vine with fine tendrils and blue, pink, purple, or white flowers. It is often used as a fodder crop for cattle, and still shows up in the cuisine of many countries around the world.

Native people in the Americas knew how to prepare this local crop safely. Traditional recipes called for adding slaked lime or calcium hydroxide, a naturally occurring mineral, to corn. (The basic recipe for tortillas still includes the addition of lime.) Without it, the niacin in corn cannot be absorbed. This is not a problem unless corn is eaten by itself and
makes up most of a person’s diet. When that happens—as it did with early settlers who did not understand the risks—the result is a severe niacin deficiency called pellagra.