These plants are to die for

You can judge a book by its cover.

The cover of “Wicked Plants — The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities” looks like the Gothic grillwork of an old cemetery gate.

Consider yourself warned, author Amy Stewart writes in the introduction.

Wicked plants can kill. And they have. And the worst of it is, we choose to grow these plants in our gardens and on our windowsills.

Stewart, New York Times best-selling author of “Flower Confidential,” “The Earth Moved” and “From the Ground Up — the Story of a First Garden,” says she didn’t write this book to scare people away from the outdoors. She draws the analogy: “I love the ocean, but I never turn my back on it. Plants deserve the same kind of guarded respect. They can nourish and heal, but they can also destroy.”

Stewart gives the reader an entertaining but sobering look at plants and their relatives that are ready to do us in.

For Halloween, you probably want the ghoulish and gory. Stewart obliges.

Enter jimson weed (Datura stramonium) and its relatives the moonflower (Datura inoxia) and brugmansia, both common in Midlands’ flower gardens.

How toxic are they? Stewart shares the story of a woman in Canada who added datura seeds as seasoning to hamburger patties. She was in a coma for 24 hours before she recovered enough to tell doctors what she had done.

A tea made of the leaves is deadly, starting with days of hallucinations, fevers high enough to kill brain cells and failure of the autonomic nervous system, which regulates the heart rate and breathing, leading to coma and death.

Theme chapters, such as Deadly Dinner, delight in the mundane. Corn, for instance, seems so innocuous and is fine in a balanced diet. But when eaten exclusively — as was the case of early immigrants to North America — it causes pellagra, a niacin deficiency. During the first half of the 20th century, Stewart informs us, pellagra sickened 3 million Americans and killed 100,000.

Stewart teaches, and she entertains. In the category of Painful, there’s the habanero pepper, botanically known as Capsicum chinense.

This chili is generally off the charts. The jalapeño pepper, generally considered to be the limit for sane taste buds, gets a rating of around 5,000 Scoville Heat Units (use BTUs of a furnace for a comparison). The habanero variety called “Red Savina” earned a rating of 500,000 SHUs.

Stewart writes that hot pepper fanatics kept going, developing the “Dorset Naga” variety from the seeds of a Bangladeshi pepper. Its heat levels approach 1 million SHUs.

Measuring just 5½ by 7¼ inches, this diarylike book covers more than 200 plants. Sepia-toned pages are bound between dark brown endpapers. Adding to the medieval look of the book are etchings by Briony Morrow-Cribbs and drawings by Jonathon Rosen, who succeed in making plants and their parts look evil and menacing.

And of course, there’s the title story of the milk sickness that killed Abraham Lincoln’s mother, Nancy Hanks Lincoln. Cattle that browsed through fields of white snakeroot produced milk, butter and meat contaminated by the deadly plant. But save that for some night when you’re having trouble sleeping and get up for a glass of warm milk.

Contact the writer:

444-1059, rhonda.stansberry@owh.com

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