Toxic Plants

A sad looking Halloween pumpkin slowly rots on the compost heap You might think that at this time of year there’s not a lot happening on the allotment, but nothing could be further from the truth.   There are all sorts of jobs to be done before the spring.   In April everything starts growing at the same time: the weeds start growing and need pulling up, the grass starts growing and needs cutting, the seedlings start growing and need planting.     I’ve learned the hard way that if you don’t get the winter jobs done by the end of March, you never get on top of it until the next winter.   Also, at the end of each year, I like to reflect on what went well and what went badly, try to work out the reasons, and adjust my plans for the next year.   So here are some photos of my allotment in winter and a description of some of the jobs I’m tackling. Four flowerpots full of sand These are my Belladonna (Deadly Nightshade) roots in hibernation.   Belladonn...

Monkshood plant USUAL WARNING: DON’T TRY THIS AT HOME, OR ANYWHERE ELSE.  THESE ARE NOT RECREATIONAL DRUGS, THESE ARE TOXIC PLANTS FOR EMERGENCY USE ONLY AND NEED TO BE TREATED WITH THE UTMOST REPECT.   This month we are returning to our core theme of toxic plants.  Regular readers will remember that that the purpose of this blog is to explore the medicinal uses of certain toxic herbs, sometimes known as “witches’ herbs”, with particular reference to their potential use as anaesthetics, in the event that chemically based anaesthetics become unavailable or in short supply - as was the case, for example, during World Wars 1 and 2 when Britain was subject to a German U-boat blockade.    So today we are looking at monkshood, also known as aconite or wolfsbane, latin name Aconitum napellus .  The plant is so named because the flowers look a little like a medieval monk’s hood, and because extracts of the plant were used to prepare poisoned arrows for hunting...

As you may know, the British Prime Minister recently announced that a General Election would be held in the UK on 4 July. Campaigning here is ramping up, so I am going to depart from our usual gardening theme this month and look at some of the policies (or lack of them) up for debate (or not). For non-UK readers, here is a brief summary of UK politics. For over 100 years, UK governments have been formed by either the Labour Party or the Conservative Party. The current government is Conservative; the predicted result of the upcoming election is a swing to Labour. The Conservative Party is right-leaning and is somewhat comparable to the US Republicans; the Labour Party is left-leaning and is somewhat comparable to the US Democrats. There are several minority parties who have no realistic prospect of winning a majority or forming a government; however, they may hold the balance of power in a “hung Parliament” where no party has an overall majority. Minority parties contesting this el...

Book cover, "The Old Vegetable Neurotics" It may seem odd to be reviewing a book which is over 150 years old, but let me explain the background to it.   For the last few years I have been trying to recreate the plant based anaesthetics used in ancient Greek and Roman times, medieval Europe, and more recently in World Wars 1 and 2, for a thought experiment: what would we do for anaesthetics if civilisation collapsed and global supply chains and the pharmaceutical industry no longer functioned? Recipes for making these anaesthetics must have existed in times past, but it is difficult to find them today, either because they have disintegrated through passage of time, or they were never written down because the practitioners who used them were illiterate, or they are written in medieval English or Latin and are hard to understand.   Opium poppies growing on Douglas Promenade, Isle of Man I am hoping that an ongoing research project, Curious Cures in Cambridge Libraries   may ...