The Dark Side Of Plants

June 9, 2009
Interview with Amy Stewart, author of Wicked Plants

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Mike Carruthers:
We think of plants as being fairly benign but there are some mean, nasty and dangerous plants - for instance oleander.

Amy Stewart:
Oleanders grow all over the southern part of the United States and it is really a highly, highly toxic shrub that will make you very sick. It will make you very weak and can kill you quite quickly.

Amy Stewart, author of the book Wicked Plants

In fact, there's a woman on death row in California right now who attempted to murder her husband with oleander, it made him sick enough to land him in the hospital but she eventually had to kill him with antifreeze.

Did you know that Abraham Lincoln's mother was killed by a plant?

This is a plant called white snakeroot - cows that graze on white snakeroot will become sick, the poison will get into their milk and people who drink the milk will get sick. So this was actually a pretty common ailment called "milk sickness" and it could wipe out entire families so Abraham Lincoln's mother died of "milk sickness" when Abe was nine years old.

The primary reason some plants are so dangerous is for survival. For instance tobacco plants produce nicotine as a pesticide to keep bugs off the plant.

And in the United States you used to be able to buy nicotine-based pesticides to spray on your plants to kill bugs but it's so dangerous that it's been taken off the shelves as a pesticide.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.