Deadly nightshade

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I realized recently that I’ve written about a lot of nefarious plants: Darlingtonia (AKA the cobra lily) and pokeweed.


I guess I sort of love the deadly plants. There are the poisonous ones, like poke, and the meat-eating ones, like Darlingtonia. They don’t pull any punches. They don’t like us members of the animal kingdom – or, rather, they like us fine, so long as we’re for breakfast.


A few years ago, before the I-195 bridge through Providence was uprooted, there were some beautiful Datura plants under the overpass. Datura (also called Jimson weed) is reputedly hallucinogenic, and even deadly. (In the Delibes opera “Lakme,” the title character commits suicide by drinking nectar from a Datura flower.)


Then there’s deadly nightshade.


We are having a lovely crop of it around town this year. See the above photo? That’s in a parking lot about two blocks from my office. Nightshade (AKA Atropa belladonna) is completely deadly; the families of the early Roman emperors were decimated by people (like Livia, the wife of Augustus) who knew how to use  Atropa correctly.


It’s a lovely plant, as you can see above, and looks completely harmless. It’s a member of the same family as the tomato, and (as you might imagine) it took a while for the tomato to become accepted in Europe and America, because in those days, everyone knew what happened when you ate those little appetizing-looking red fruits.


Also, it has its everyday uses. If you use the extract (called “atropine”) as eyedrops, it gives you lovely big dark pupils. This accounts for its other name: belladonna, “beautiful woman.”


Also, atropine reduces your vulnerability to radiation. If you know a nuclear strike is impending, take a big dose of atropine and get in a bathtub full of water; you’ll greatly reduce your danger of radiation poisoning.


Unless, of course, the nuclear strike doesn’t happen. In which case you will die of atropine poisoning.


But life isn’t perfect, is it?

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The Darlingtonia preserve

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In 2005, on one of our trips to the Pacific Northwest, Partner and I were running up and down the Oregon coast: Lincoln City, Yachats, Florence. 

 

 

On our way to Florence I noticed an odd sign pointing to a DARLINGTONIA PRESERVE.  The name rang a very faint bell, but I couldn’t quite place it, and I suggested that we stop.

 

 

I am so glad we did.

 

 

It is a small park which serves as a natural preserve for a rare local plant, the Darlingtonia californica, aka the cobra lily.

 

 

Darlingtonia is a carnivorous plant resembling the pitcher plant.  Its body is a cup of water, topped by a cobra-like hood.  Insects blunder inside and fall into the water to drown; the hood helps keeps them inside if they try to escape.

 

 

Once they’re dead, Darlingtonia californica eats them up, slowly, by dissolving them and absorbing their delicious little bodies.

 

 

Bloodthirsty, I know. But the plants were gorgeous, and you have never seen so many together in one place in your life.  They were shining bright green in the fitful Oregon summer sunlight, hundreds of them in their damp little peat bog, humming to themselves, waiting for the little buggies to arrive for lunch.

 

 

Plants are remarkable.  We animals have always had an advantage over plants, seemingly; we move faster, anyway. But plants are sneaky and malevolent. Some are poisonous, like nightshade and datura and pokeweed. Some sting and burn, like nettles and poison ivy. Some are beautiful and dangerous, like the foxglove. Some can gash the hell out of you, like the cholla cactus. Some of them can poison the ground beneath themselves, so that nothing else can grow (many conifers do this).

 

 

But all of them, just like Darlingtonia californica, are beautiful in the sunshine.

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