Nonfiction review: Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities

Don't go out in the woods today," the song cautions us, but as Amy Stewart's comprehensive and lavishly illustrated "Wicked Plants" asserts, nowhere is completely safe. Certainly anywhere plants are grown, indoors as well as out, in gardens as well as the wilds, danger lurks for the ignorant and the unsuspecting.

Seamlessly mixing the arcane with the anecdotal, Stewart is intent on entertaining as much as informing. And the dangers and wickedness she describes are meant to interest, not terrify; as she admits in the preface, "I love a good villain whether it is the pencil cactus with its corrosive sap, or the hallucinatory moonflower."

The dangers are numerous and varied, and range from deadly -- aconite (more familiarly monkshood -- resembles horseradish, but if eaten causes death by asphyxiation -- to the less-lethal irritants of poison ivy and nettles. Plants can also be, as Stewart notes, destructive, addictive and illegal.

Over the centuries, humans have learned which plants to use for medicinal as well as malevolent purposes. Eating the berries of the yew will bring on heart failure -- Julius Caesar in his Gallic Wars refers to a war-worn chieftain who "destroyed himself with the juice of the yew-tree" -- but yew extract (Taxol) fights tumors. Deadly nightshade is a killer, but atropine, an extract from the plant, is sometimes used as an antidote to nerve gas and pesticide exposure.

The destructive plants include not only the familiar kudzu vine but also the water hyacinth and a single-celled algae, Caulera taxifolia. Escaping from an aquarium in Germany, the algae now spans more than 32,000 acres of oceans around the world, where it poisons fish and chokes aquatic life.

Others, such as the squirting cucumber that squirts a "slimy, mucus-like juice and seeds almost twenty feet away," or the Rafflesia, whose famous enormous flower smells like rotten meat and attracts flies, are merely offensive.

The betel nut, the coca plant as well as the illegal cannabis and Khat are addictive. Others are deadly if imbibed in large amounts: Absinthe, which is flavored with wormwood, can kill; quinine, an extract of the cinchonia tree's bark in tonic water, can cause cardiac symptoms; and the sweet woodruff that flavors May Wine may produce paralysis or death.

Stewart has written a not-too-serious guide to the evils of the outdoors in a book filled with facts to savor and quote.

Judith Chettle is a Richmond-based book reviewer and writer.