Large Fierce Mammal

Visitors to the Alnwick Poison Garden are prohibited from smelling, touching, or tasting anything, lest they die. (Alnwick is pronounced “ANN-ick”)

Murder by poison has a long dark history. For example, whether historically accurate or cooked up by rivals, the Borgia family name is indelibly stained with it. Poison is less used today for killing things that walk on two legs for reasons well presented by Esther Inglis-Arkell in her article The Deadliest Poisons in History (And Why People Stopped Using Them). Go and read that. You’ll enjoy it, and might even avoid arrest thereby. Major thanks to my Esteemed Friend Jim Keating for bringing it to my attention.

In this iteration of Dark Sentiments, we’ve already looked at one poisoner in my poem Laura’s Pie back on Day 2. You will recall that Laura liked to lure men with her mysteriously long lasting looks, charm them with her skills in the boudoir and kitchen, and then kill them with her Hemlock laced pie. Her motives were obvious to everyone but her hapless victims who were all thinking with the wrong head. ~ Dark Sentiments 2012 – Day 11: Bertram’s Restaurant

In 1995, Jane Percy became the Duchess of Northumberland when her husband, Ralph Percy, inherited the title and responsibilities of 12th Duke of Northumberland following the sudden and unexpected death of his brother. An interesting turn of affairs considering the subject matter of today’s Dark Sentiment, but I can assure you that it had nothing to do with what you’re thinking.

With the title came Alnwick Castle, ancestral home to the Family Percy for over 700 years, and the setting of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the first two Harry Potter films. So, what does all this have to do with poison? Let us harken to the words of the Good Duchess herself, as quoted in Natasha Geiling’s Smithsonian.com article, Step Inside the World’s Most Dangerous Garden (If You Dare):

… After the family took up residence in the castle, (Jane) Percy’s husband asked her to do something with the gardens, which at the time were a disused commercial forestry boasting nothing more than rows and rows of Christmas trees.

“I think he thought, ‘That will keep her quiet, she’ll just plant a few roses and that’ll be it,'” the duchess says. But Percy did more than plant a few roses ….

… The duchess thought she might want to include an apothecary garden, but a trip to Italy set her on a slightly different course. After visiting the infamous Medici poison garden, the duchess became enthralled with the idea of creating a garden of plants that could kill instead of heal. Another trip—this one to the archeological site of the largest hospital in medieval Scotland, where the duchess learned about soporific sponges soaked in henbane, opium and hemlock used to anesthetize amputees during 15th-century surgeries—reinforced her interest in creating a garden of lethal plants.

“I thought, ‘This is a way to interest children,'” she says. “Children don’t care that aspirin comes from a bark of a tree. What’s really interesting is to know how a plant kills you, and how the patient dies, and what you feel like before you die.”

So the duchess set about collecting poisonous plants for her envisioned Poison Garden. While selecting the 100 varieties that would eventually take root there, she had only one steadfast requirement: the plants had to tell a good story. This meant that exotic killers like South America’s Brugmansia* would mingle with more common poisons, such as laurel hedges.

This is delightful! How did she know what kind of child I was and would raise? And while I certainly would never offer the incomparable Mrs. LFM a job simply for the purpose of keeping her busy, I’m quite certain that if I asked her to take 14 acres of garden in hand, and provided her with the budget to do it to her satisfaction, I’d get something pretty close to this.

As I sat sipping my delightfully toxic libation … neat … and pondering today’s subject, this popped out:

A plant may sicken, kill, or cure
When measured thoughtfully.
‘Tis a question of intention
And a matter of degree.

 That being said, I’ll leave you with some appropriate musical accompaniment.