A further post in my series republishing The Folklore of Herbs (1946), a book by Katherine Oldmeadow, who was a significant figure in the British pagan revival.

CHAPTER VII.

POISONOUS HERBS.

Although we are told that there is healing in every herb that grows, it is dangerous to experiment with them. As medicines they should be administered only by skilled persons. The herbalist, learning his art, must be wary, and never taste the berries, or any part of a plant, unless its properties are known to him.

They may look as innocent and attractive as the fruits offered for sale in Goblin Market; and yet he must beware, because certain parts of healing plants are often poisonous.

It may be that this occurs only at certain seasons. The peculiar properties of medicinal herbs depend so much on skilled knowledge of the proper moment to pick them, that many of those with healing virtues when in the perfection of their young greenness become almost a deadly poison at seeding time.

There are plants with roots which resemble some homely garden vegetable that are mistaken sometimes for wild varieties and eaten – with disastrous consequences. One example of this danger is fools’ parsley, which has roots like a parsnip. This handsome but poisonous plant usually grows in ditches, and it should be avoided.

Another of Saturn’s plants, also of the parsley family, is hemlock, with its great umbel of creamy white flowers, common to the wayside. It has thick stems with purplish spots, and a strong, unpleasant scent which should act as a danger signal to the unwary.

It was this deadly plant which was in the poison cup drunk by the great philosopher, Socrates, and a witch’s poison brew usually contained it. Sheep sometimes eat it without ill effects, but animals can often eat with impunity plants poisonous to man.

The water dropwort, another parsley herb, has roots like parsnips, and it has often caused sudden death to foolish eaters.

The seeds of the lovely, golden laburnum are deadly; but perhaps most disastrous of all is the deadly nightshade, whose shining black berries, sweet in taste when ripe, are so attractive to children. Every part of this sinister plant – root, stem, leaves, flowers and fruit – is poisonous. Deadly nightshade is not so common as formerly, but it is usually found in waste, stony ground. It has large, glossy, oval leaves and bell-shaped flowers like a campanula of purple or violet. The berry is almost as large as a cherry, green when unripe and purplish-black later. In the hands of the skilled herbalist even this deadly plant is precious, for it yields the medicine belladonna.

A near relation to deadly nightshade is woody nightshade or bitter-sweet, a pretty, climbing plant often seen in the hedgerows when blackberrying. It has flowers of purple, the anthers rising in a yellow cone. The berries are green, becoming scarlet, and the plant is poisonous.

The black nightshade, too, is highly poisonous. It is found growing in waste places. It is a few feet high with flowers very like small potato flowers and bearing green berries.

Henbane is another poisonous plant, deadly to man, although sometimes apparently harmless to cattle. Its flowers are funnel shaped, of a dull, unwholesome yellow with purplish veins, a malevolent dark eye and a repellent odour. This is the plant which, according to Shakespeare, killed Hamlet’s father, and the ghost proclaims the deed in these lines:

“Upon my secure hour thy uncle stole

With juice of cursed hebonon in a vial,

And in the porches of mine ears did pour

The leperous distilment…”

But the henbane can be used by the skilled physician as a medicine, and, like belladonna, it acts as a sedative.

The caterpillar of the largest of our British moths, the death’s-head hawk moth, feeds chiefly on the leaves of all the poisonous plants just mentioned, a fact which appears sinister to the imaginative. It is a yellowy-greenish creature with oblique stripes on its sides and a rough, twisted horn on its back; quite evidently another child of Saturn.

A small plant with yellowish-white flowers, found in shady woods in May, is the baneberry, whose black, poisonous berries have given it its name.

Along the country lanes, under hedges in spring, we find lords and ladies, the lords wearing coronets of regal purple and the ladies gold. The tall spathe forms a green canopy above them.

This plant has country names galore, and it is said that it was once called starchwort, because it was used for stiffening the ruffs worn by the lords and ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s Court. It is also called wild arum, cuckoo pint, parson-in-the-pulpit and wake-robin.

After flowering, the lords and ladies fall off and leave a thick cluster of green berries, which turn from green to a deep red. These must never be eaten as they are highly poisonous.

Every one knows the beautiful garden plant monkshood, with its lovely dark-blue flowers like the cowls of Carmelite monks. It is sometimes known as wolfsbane, because hunters used to poison wolves with it. This is a dangerous plant and it was used by the ancient Greeks for poisoning their darts; but its leaves and roots yield a valuable medicine known as Aconite.

A rare and beautiful plant like a Christmas rose, only green in all its parts, is hellebore, sometimes impolitely called “stinking hellebore.” Its flowers are poisonous, and all parts of the plant should be left alone by persons ignorant of the properties of herbs.

Gilbert White, in his History of Selborne, records how mothers in the village used to gather the leaves of hellebore, powder them and give them as a medicine to their children; a drastic cure which must have caused much suffering to the poor little victims, and indeed sometimes almost killed them. But children were dosed and physicked much more unpleasantly in the eighteenth century than they are now.

Two other green-flowered plants dangerously poisonous are dogs’ mercury, found in woods in April and May, and herb Paris, which has a blue-black berry and flowers in May and June.

That grandfather-of-all-the-trees, the yew, has a bad reputation as a poisoner. The birds will eat its bright, red berries like gluttons, but the whole tree is supposed to be poisonous to man and cattle.

In the old days, when cattle were said to have died under the glare of a witch’s evil eye, the real reason was often that some careless person had left the clippings of a yew tree in their path.

In learning how to identify poisonous plants, it is well to remember that all those belonging to the order crucifera are non-poisonous. The flower has four petals in the form of a Maltese Cross. Wallflowers, cuckoo-flowers, cabbages, cresses and so on belong to this large order.

While writing of poisonous plants common to field and hedgerow, it would not do to leave out the queerest plant family that grows. This is the fungi family. When we speak of fungi most people’s thoughts immediately fly to mushrooms and toadstools; the former meaning something safe to eat and the latter something highly poisonous.

But whether mushroom, puff-ball, or toadstool, edible or poisonous, they all belong to the large family of fungi, which includes bacteria, the yeasts, the mildews, earth stars, coral fungi and the smuts and rusts which harm the crops.

English people are terrified of any field fungi, except the mushroom; and they refuse to believe that more than two hundred of the wicked “toadstools” are innocent of any desire to kill. But these are eaten with enjoyment on the Continent and because of their nutritious properties they are called the “Manna of the Poor,” and a certain fungus called boletus is considered a dish fit to set before a king.

But the English, with the exception of epicures who know how to identify edible fungi, refuse to follow Continental fashions and will not consent to eat snails, frogs, or toadstools; and they still associate the last-named with bad fairies and the poison draughts of witches.

Country folk in some districts still tell their children that if they are foolish enough to fall asleep in a fairy ring of toadstools they will be carried away and never return. Perhaps the toadstools gained their reputation for magical power by their rapidity of growth. After all, it is a bit startling to unscientific persons to find that a large toadstool or mushroom has sprung up during the night. And what fairy tales could be made up about the luminous toadstools sometimes found in dark caves!

There are, of course, poisonous toadstools which have slain their thousands, and to learn how to identify the innocent takes time and study. Continental people have been brought up to it, and perhaps it is providential that others, who have not had this advantage, should have a wholesome fear of strange members of the rather queer fungi family.

But whether good or bad they are a fascinating crowd and always give charm to their surroundings, and sometimes a faint sort of hilarity to the densest and most mysterious of forest glades. We have seen them in the deep rides of the New Forest in autumn, looking like gay trippers to Fairyland, dressed in flaunting colours and absurd fashions.

The “wavy pinkgills” is a charming example of this, wearing a large, shady umbrella hat, coquettishly turned up at the sides with pink.

The chameleon, in green-pink, is another charmer. Just as in all crowds there are quiet, respectable families attired in dull, serviceable colours, so the warty caps, in sombre brown with just a few festive white spots on their hats, troop together sociably near some fallen log, and watch the fun.

An extremely quaint fungus is the parasol mushroom, for it wears a sort of Elizabethan ruff of white. The horn of plenty is a perfect cornucopia in shape, and the chanterelle looks like a lovely, golden cup-like flower. The golden spike appears like flaming candles set in a cresset.

The stinkhorn fungus affects an absurd little cap like an inverted acorn, and the fungus with the lovely name of girdled acorn bearer stands like a lord dressed up for coronation.

But beware of the vernal toadstool, a poisoner with white gills and wearing a yellowish cap!

Another lovely little creature wearing a fiery, scarlet cap dotted with cream spots as warty as a toad’s back, appears like a bright jewel on the floor of the wood in autumn. This is the fly toadstool – and touch him not! Toadstools are wonderful things with wonderful names, some of which delight us and some which make us tremble, and act as a danger signal. For who in his right senses would risk eating a fungus called “the destroying angel!”

[Added note:] Since going to press, the Fungi family is “in the news.” Fungi are now more than something edible and decorative; they are, through the discovery of Penicillin, benefactors to mankind. They may become even more famous, for, at the present moment, hundreds of moulds and toadstools are being tested to see if they produce anti-bacterial chemicals.