By Linda Lovely
Our blog’s October theme is “tricky treats.” So it’s lucky for me that my neighborhood gardening group paid a visit to the North Carolina Arboretum last week. Had I known about the Arboretum’s Wicked Plants exhibit I’d have hustled up to Asheville even sooner. What mystery author can resist a creepy Victorian-era mansion where room after room is devoted to how plants—or some portion of them—have the power to sicken, paralyze, or even murder?
A book by Amy Stewart, Wicked Plants: The Weed that Killed Lincoln’s Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities, provided the inspiration and much of the historical and factual information incorporated in the exhibit, which will be at the Arboretum until Januray 7. Stewart’s book is definitely coming to my bedside table soon.
My favorite display was the Last Supper room. Each place setting featured a plate that asked you to guess what plant was responsible for the death or disability of the person who’d occupied that seat at the table. Many of the answers were quite surprising. Who knew that foods commonplace on our dinner tables—like corn, potatoes, and celery—had such destructive powers? Of course, in several instances, one either had to totally pig out on the food, ingest portions of the plant that aren’t normally consumed, or eat the vegetable when it had already entered into an uncommon state of decay.
While I don’t want to spoil the guessing games for anyone who plans to attend, I’ll provide one historical example. As an Iowa native, who has eaten more than her share of corn, I was astounded to learn this tasty treat might be responsible for vampire legends.
In the 1500s, corn was among the treasures that European explorers brought back from the new world. Because it was easy to grow and cheap, corn became the main nutritional source for a lot of poor people, who ate it raw. As a result, these people didn’t get enough niacin, an essential vitamin, and became victims of a condition called pellagra. While corn does contain niacin, our bodies aren’t able to access the vitamin if the corn’s eaten raw.
So what are the pellagra symptoms? They can include hypersensitivity to sunlight, insomnia, aggressiveness, and an inability to digest much beyond animal blood. However, in the New World, pellagra wasn’t a problem because people cooked the corn and often used lime in making their corn tortillas. Lime works to chemically release the niacin locked in raw corn.
While I’m not planning to make any of my future characters eat a steady diet of raw corn, I'm almost certain some future character will succumb to a wicked plant. Thanks, North Carolina Arboretum!
Incidentally, Henery Press released my new humorous mystery, BONES TO PICK, this week! And my heroine's father, a horticultural professor, grows a poisonous garden--for research, of course. Click HERE to learn more.
7 comments:
That sounds like fun! LOVED Bones to Pick!
It was fun. Definitely have to read the book.
What an interesting post! I'd love to go on that tour. Your book sounds really intriguing. A whole garden of poisonous plants, I LIKE that idea. Good luck on sales.
Interesting post! I'd like to go on that tour, too, if I didn't live in Oregon! Bones to Pick sounds fun (and interesting!)
Okay, I admit I just couldn't resist! Bones to Pick is on my Kindle!
Linda, What a find for you! I've known about deadly plants forever...having been warned away from things like eating rhubarb unless it was cooked (or maybe it's just the leaves). But that tour would be fascinating and I don't write mysteries or thrillers or really even books where one can find a dead body.
Glad so many of you found this interesting, too. Even if you don't write mysteries, it's so interesting to see all the different kinds of "Wicked" plants. In addition to plants that sicken and/or poison you, the display also included stinky plants like corpse flowers and invasive plants like kudzu. So much variety! And thank you very much Sarah for downloading BONES TO PICK! Hope you like it.
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