Pretty Poison: Plants to Die For

These Flowering Plants May Be Beautiful, But They'll Kill the Careless or Unaware

(CBS)  We're well into summer now, an excuse to spend time in the great outdoors. Just be careful of some of that pleasant mountain greenery just waiting to be plucked by the careless or unaware. Martha Teichner reports our Cover Story:

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In Eureka, California, Amy Stewart takes us on a tour of her home. But after visiting what she calls her "good garden," she then leads the way along a path to evil . . .

"This is the poison garden, just on the other side of this gate," she said, leading the way into a horticultural Death Row.

You heard right: poison. Just about every plant growing here could kill you.

"I find out that if there was a plant that was used to commit a crime or started a war, I sort of love that, you know, a plant with a dark history."

Take foxglove: Ingesting it is like putting your heart on steroids. And oleander? "Very deadly," Stewart said. "Oleander contains cardiac glycocides that will actually stop the heart."

Angelina Rodriguez of Montebello, Calif., tried to kill her husband by serving him oleander soup. It only put him in the hospital. She finished the job with antifreeze-spiked Gatorade. Rodriguez wanted his insurance - she got the death penalty.

And that pretty monk's hood?

"Ultimately it can bring on death by asphyxiation," said Stewart.

She also showed Teicher a pretty tall white flower that resembles Queen Anne's lace. "This is hemlock, it's poison hemlock. It's the plant that killed Socrates."

Stewart is the author of "Wicked Plants," an entertaining but scary little volume of horticultural horror stories. It includes, yes, the weed that killed Lincoln's mother (white snakeroot).

"It's a poisonous plant, toxic also to cows, and so the cows would graze on the plant, the cow would get sick, the poison would end up in the milk, people would drink the milk and get sick and die," Stewart explained. "This was called milk sickness, and so Abraham Lincoln's mother died of milk sickness when Abe was only about nine years old.

"And then there's Frederick Law Olmstead, the famous landscape architect. At the age of 14, he was nearly blinded by exposure to poison sumac. He missed a year of school, but it didn't stop him from going on to design New York's Central Park."

(Left: Amy Stewart shows off her "evil garden.")

"This is all terrifying," Teichner remarked.

"It is kind of terrifying, isn't it?" Stewart said. "But, you know what, these kinds of poisons are all around us."

And that's the point . . . just think poison ivy.

Dr. Cathleen Clancy, associate medical director at the National Capital Poison Center in Washington, D.C., said that across the United States last year, there were 63,000 cases of exposure to poisonous plants.

"About 43,000 of those were children under the age of six," Dr. Clancy said.

Those were cases reported to the national 1-800 poison help number, such as an exposure to the habanero pepper.

Don't laugh . . . eating a habanero pepper could actually put somebody in the hospital.

Peppers, including habaneros, are members of the nightshade family, which Amy Stewart says includes some of the best - and worst - plants in existence.

Datura (commonly called thornapple) is also in the nightshade family: "A very dangerous plant that can interfere with respiration and heart rate and can ultimately send someone into a coma," said Stewart.

But look what else is in the nightshade family: tomatoes . . . eggplants . . . and potatoes.

Figuring out what's poisonous and what isn't can be tricky.

Christopher McCandless, the subject of the bestseller and later the film "Into the Wild," went to Alaska and lived off the land, eating what he found growing around him. It's widely believed (but hasn't been proven conclusively) that he died because he confused a poisonous plant for an edible one.

"I think you would be making a mistake to assume that the plant kingdom is benign," Stewart said. "I mean, the plant kingdom makes strychnine, it makes cyanide, it makes ricin. I mean, some of the most toxic poisons on the planet come from plants."

Stewart pulled out vials from an old doctor's kit. "I realized that these are some of my wicked plants." She takes the kit to with her to book signings.

"You will not be surprised to see that I also carry around with me the world's worst plant . . . tobacco!"

OK, she put the cigarette there, but it was to make people recognize tobacco as a poison plant.

Teichner examined little speckled brown seeds called castor beans, which grow beautifully in Stewart's garden. It is pretty," Stewart said. "Pretty deadly."

Ricin is a toxic by-product of castor beans. On September 7, 1978, Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian working for the BBC in London, was waiting for a bus when somebody (the KGB was suspected) jabbed him in the back of the leg with an umbrella. Four days later Markov was dead - killed by ricin.

How much ricin? A little speck.

But now consider this . . . castor oil, the old-fashioned laxative, also comes from castor beans, and is harmless.

"The poison is in the dose, said Kip Panter, who heads the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Poisonous Plant Research Laboratory in Logan, Utah. "Most things are toxic if they're eaten in large enough quantities or too much."

For over a century, the USDA has been sending teams to the remotest parts of the West to investigate plant poisonings, which cost ranchers $340 million a year in livestock losses.

Today, the USDA runs what Panter brags is like a CSI lab devoted to plant pathology.

He showed Teichner Japanese yew. "It's very toxic to cattle, very toxic to horses, and toxic to others species, including humans."

So toxic that Panter says, "Don't plant yew trees it if you've got children or pets."

But here's the flip side: Japanese yew contains a compound called taxol, which has been used for cancer chemotherapy for a number of years.

Foxglove produces digitalis, a heart medication.

Lupine is very good feed for animals with good nutrients. The only trouble is, if they happen to be pregnant, their babies will be born with serious deformities, a condition called crooked calf syndrome in cattle. In goats, it causes cleft palate.

"Goats turned out to be a real good model because they're small enough that we can do ultrasound on the mothers," said Panter.

Which led to an amazing and promising discovery: all because of a plant that can be poisonous, researchers from the Utah lab and plastic surgeons from the Lahey Clinic in Boston found they could fix cleft palate by operating on the fetus inside the womb. The fetus thus has the ability to repair without scar tissue formation.

So the baby goat is born completely normal, indistinguishable from any other, and that's pretty remarkable when you think about the potential . . . if that procedure were able to be done in humans.

At Brooklyn Botanical Garden...)..P.7/ scot//we thought wicked plants, a garden to die for, would be a good hook..(walk-n-talk long shot)

At the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, between now and the end of the summer, the public can get a new appreciation of the power of nature, both good and evil. You can wander at will among the villainous Venus fly traps that digest unlucky insects.

(Left: The Venus fly trap. If you were small enough, this plant would eat you.)

The victim "sticks to it and then it closes, and gradually these enzymes begin to dissolve it . . . pretty gruesome," said Scot Medbury, president of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Or you can toddle on by the treacherous taro.

"You may have heard of that from Hawaii, where they make poi," said Medbury. "But this has oxalate crystals in it, so if you don't boil or leech or otherwise soak out those things, it really can affect your vocal cords."

They may swell up so you won't be able to swallow...

"A little knowledge goes a long way," he said.

"Do people come here, take a look at all the poisonous plants, and it scares the living daylights out of them?" Teichner asked.

"I don't think so, I think they're intrigued," Medbury said.

The takeaway here: Be intrigued, but beware.


For more info:
• "Wicked Plants" by Amy Stewart
• USDA Poison Plant Research Lab
[phone]
• American Association of Poison Control Centers
[phone] (Poison emergency phone number)
• Brooklyn Botanic Garden
[phone]

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[Vicki R De Boer]

I love the serendipity of life. I try to never miss CBS Sunday Morning, however on this particular day, I was in Victoria,BC, Canada - and just happened to have the time and inclination to find it on the hotel television.

I missed the opening part to the plant segment, but I had just purchased TWO copies of the book, sending one to my brother in Indiana and keeping the other one myself. We are both taxonomic speaking "plantophiles" and delight in the whim and wit in publications such as this. It is a great read, and quite delightful! Some folks take themselves entirely too seriously!!

[chuckbowler]

I've been an herbalist and biology teacher for many years. Yes the piece is a bit sensationalist, but none of it is untrue in any sense. I often introduce plants like this on a nature hike with my middle school students to shock them into paying attention! In fact, I bought the book and would really like a copy of that video segment to show my students. It nicely ties botany into cultural history. Thanks for the segment.

[zeta211]

What was the music played during this piece?

[opinions-are-just-that]

I feel your segment Pretty poison is a little one sided. Yes, all of these plants can be poisonus in the wrong hands but in the hands of a true healer can be very helpful and have been for centuries. The evidence is the medical kit. thank you, K

[jm_xxxxx]

Another greedy person making money by exploiting others ignorance.
Calling them "poisonous" is a mis-use of the word purely to scare people; the correct category for these plants is "toxic". While Martha Teichner goes on about how extremely poisonous the castor bean plant is, she fails to mention that it is only really poisonous if the seeds are refined and concentrated to make the ricin.

What makes them sound bad is that some people are hyper-sensitive to them, just like some people are extremely sensitive to poison ivy, peanuts, milk and many other things. People die, but not because they are poisonous, they die because they are really allergic to them.

People should be aware that many plants can be potentially harmful, using exaggerated terms like "poisonous" for relatively benign plants confuses them with really dangerous plants like the death cap mushroom.

Don't waste your money on this book, more accurate information about toxic and poisonous plants is available free on the internet.

[LB_pharm]

As someone who has worked in a poison center for many years, I disagree with much of this post. Many of the plants shown on the segment are "poisonous". Cases of toxicity with oleander, castor beans (they are toxic if chewed and swallowed - they do not have to be refined), foxglove, nightshade, jimsonweed... And the toxicity is not allergic in nature - they are truly toxic or poisonous. Deaths from plants are very rare but there were more than 1000 reports in 2007 to poison centers of moderate or severe effects mostly due to systemic toxicity, not allergic reactions. I have not read the book but would advise calling a poison center for information, especially if a child or adult has eaten some of a plant. Don't just search the internet if you truly want accurate information. Who knows if the internet sites you go to are accurate?

[boykinND]

This segment was awesom. I did a talk along the same line called "Real World Toxicity". Visiting the toxic plants and their role in medicine. I will be doing a series of lectures at the Brooklyn Public Library called Naturopathic Awareness in the month of September along these lines. Dr. Mark Boykin ND.