MARLENE McCARTY
INTO THE WEEDS: SEX & DEATH

Death & Other Altered States Garden

Achillea millefolium
Yarrow

Found in the “flower burial” at Shanidar Cave, a Neanderthal site in Kurdistan (60,000 to 35,000 BCE), aromatic yarrow with its gentle essence of anise and licorice has long been a beneficial friend to hominids. At Shanidar, the plants at the site—from yarrow to ragwort and hollyhock—have long been known to have medicinal uses, suggesting that one of those buried was a medicine man, a doctor. If true, herbal plant medicine is older than homo sapiens. Today, yarrow’s tiny white or pink flowers and feathery leaves are found around the world, testimony to the plant’s importance and reverence by many cultures. Reputedly, simply holding the energetic achillea millefolium grants psychic protection. Pressing it to the forehead cleanses the third eye and brings chakras into balance. Hebridean druids rubbed their eyes with a leaf of yarrow for second sight, clairvoyance. In the fen country of East Anglia, devil’s nettle, as it’s called, repelled evil spells. Sprinkling it at the door blocked the entrance of any witches. Dried heads and stalks are still integral to the Chinese divination ritual, I Ching, and in the American Southwest, Zuni peoples chewed blossoms and roots before fire-walking or fire-eating. The Ojibwe smoked its florets for ritual and ceremonial purposes. Considered “Life Medicine” by the Navajo, it was chewed for toothaches and made into infusions for earaches. For the Miwok and Pawnee it also served as a powerful painkiller.

Yarrow’s effects on blood are evidenced even in its name—achillea, for Achilles who carried it to Troy to treat his troops. Soldiers have used it up through the First World War to stop blood loss, and it’s also known as woundwort or staunchweed. Aided by anti-inflammatory and antiseptic oils, astringent tannins, resins, and silica, yarrow boosts tissue repair. Acting dually, it staunches the loss of blood and encourages blood flow to promote healing. The plant’s sterols act as hormones to help harmonize the menstrual cycles whether the flow be scanty or excessive.

Cows grazing in meadows and pastures where yarrow abounds are more docile. Though the plant flourishes in such idyllic landscapes, it thrives in wasteland locations where healing and balance are in desperate need.

Aconitum
Monkshood

Rubbed on the vulva by riding a broomstick, aconite was a heart-racing ingredient in witches’ flying ointments. Women reclaimed the vulvic gesture from Roman men. They once rubbed aconite on the inner lips of their sleeping wives, who died within hours, dubbing it “women-killer.” Dosage is key. Women in nineteenth-century India escaped forced marriages by using aconite to murder their husbands and evaded prosecution by saying they were using it as an aphrodisiac.

Also called monkshood for its hooded purple flowers, the genus Aconitum is a member of the buttercup family and includes over 200 species, all of which contain aconitine. The toxin causes arrhythmias, with symptoms mimicking a rabid dog. Death can occur in as little as two hours. From the Greek akoniton, for “dart” or “javelin,” aconite has been used for poisoning arrows and warfare. Natives of Nepal used Himalayan monkshood to stop the invading British army by poisoning their wells.

In Jean Genet’s transgressive 1943 novel Our Lady of the Flowers, the queer Parisian boy Culafroy discovered that deadly aconite doubles as a hallucinogenic after sneaking into a moonlit garden to eat its leaves. By day he was a shy, outcast schoolboy, but using monkshood each night, the “Renaissance would take possession of him through the mouth.” Culafroy would escape into opulence. The dose determines if one meets death or takes flight.

Ageratina altissima­­­­
White snakeroot

In the 1800s thousands of Midwestern settlers including Nancy Hanks Lincoln, ­­­­Abraham Lincoln’s mother, fell ill or died from milk sickness. Symptoms included severe vomiting, tremors, liver failure, constipation, delirium and death. A fugitive from forced relocations of local tribes, known only as medicine woman Aunt Shawnee, informed the frontier doctor Anna Pierce Hobbs Bixby that the colonizers were dying from milk tainted by the cattle’s consumption of white snakeroot. First Nation tribes familiar with the power and toxicity of ageratina altissima made poultices from the plant for snakebite, hence, white snakeroot. Dr. Bixby instructed the white settlers to remove snakeroot from the fields; however, she was ignored. The farmers and medical professionals paid her no heed. Tremetol, a complex alcohol, and glycosides in the plant poisoned anyone who drank the tainted milk, calves as well as humans. It took until 1928 before research confirmed the connection.

Deer avoid snakeroot; though its clusters of tiny white flowers offer nectar to a multitude of pollinators. Blooming in late summer and into the autumn, ageratina altissima is a boon to hungry bees, moths, and flies foraging before cold weather descends. After flowering, the fuzzy-tailed seeds are dispersed by wind. The plant also spreads by rhizomes. Where you see a plant, you may see a colony.

Snakeroot has had many uses in Native America including treatment for venereal disease and fevers. In the South, enslaved Africans carried the heart-shaped snakeroot leaves in a mojo bag to ward off jinxing illnesses. When people had so little power over their lives and lived in constant danger of being brutalized, sold off, beaten, and separated from family members, such magic was a testimony to seeking any kind of control. 

Artemisia vulgaris
Mugwort

In twenty-first-century America, drinking mugwort tea to terminate a pregnancy is grounds for jail time. Seven states have outlawed self-managed abortion, and forty laws nationwide could criminalize it. In 2004, a South Carolinian migrant mother of three was sentenced to jail for taking an abortifacient. Even an herbal abortion using mugwort—one of an estimated 525 abortifacient plants worldwide—could be a punishable crime. But the herb grows along roadsides and wastelands. Considered invasive, it spreads via rhizomes.

Mugwort, sometimes an umbrella term for similar Artemisia species, is native to Europe, Asia and North Africa. The pointed, sage-scented leaves contain eucalyptol, which targets umbilical cells and causes the uterine lining to shed. Ancient Greek, Anglo-Saxon and Indian medicine have used it for reproductive health. For over 10,000 years, the Chumash have used California mugwort, what they call molush, to promote menstruation and regulate hormonal flux in menopause. Mugwort is considered safer than traditional hormone replacement therapy.

This bitter herb is popular in cooking (especially mugwort soup), though it contains thujone, a lethal psychoactive convulsant. Inhaling what Russians call zabytko, meaning “forgetfulness,” induces lucid dreaming. Placing the stalks under a pillow while sleeping intoxicates the mind and memory. The herb also heals the body. In Chinese medicine, moxibustion—mugwort heat therapy—treats colds, inflammation and spasms. Still burned as incense in pagan rituals, mugwort was invoked in the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon Nine Herbs Charm: “Remember, Mugwort, what you revealed, / what you established at the mighty proclamation.” Spreading head to toe and body to mind, mugwort’s powers are rhizomatic, too.

Atropa belladonna
Deadly nightshade

In fourteenth-century Ireland, Dame Alice Kyteler and her servant Petronilla de Meath used belladonna to grease “a staffe, upon which [they] ambled and galloped through thick and thin.” The poison made them “fly.” Alice was Ireland’s first person to be condemned as a witch, and Petronilla was the first to be executed as one. The bishop accused them of heresy, a frequent charge after England’s invasion (with papal approval) to spread Christianity. Three centuries later in Italy, six hundred women used a belladonna-based potion, Aqua Tofana, to kill their husbands and escape Christianity’s cruel institution of marriage. They were perhaps inspired by the ancient Roman “matron poisoners,” the 366 noblewomen who besieged the city with belladonna by poisoning their own domineering kin, the all-male ruling class.

Common names include devil’s berries, death cherries, beautiful death, devil’s herb, great morel, dwayberry and dwale. A member of the nightshade family from Europe, North Africa and Western Asia, belladonna can intoxicate and kill but also heal. Once used as an anesthetic, its alkaloids are still medicinal: belladonna supplements line store shelves to treat fevers, dry eyes, earaches, inflammation and anxiety. The bell-shaped flowers and black berries were useful in warfare, too. In the American Civil War, medical wagons and hospitals treated various ailments with the deadly nightshade. Two centuries before Dame Alice, Macbeth of Scotland (1005-1057) dispatched his foes with it. He gave belladonna-tainted liquor to the invading Danish army, killing the enemy in their sleep.   

Cicuta maculata
Water hemlock

Water hemlock is a trickster: it looks like parsley, tastes like wild parsnip and smells like a carrot. As the deadliest plant in North America and member of the parsley family, the weed has poisoned children who used the red-spotted stems for whistles, peashooters and snorkels. One of its names is children’s bane; another is cowbane, (“bane” itself means “poison.”) The tuberous roots deceive animals, too. Just one bite can kill a cow. Each year water hemlock and other toxic weeds poison livestock across America.

Found in marshy meadows, fields and parking lots, water hemlock is native to North America. The Cicuta genus contains cicutoxin, which paralyzes the central nervous system, causing vomiting, diarrhea, kidney failure, heart irregularities, seizures and death. Muscle convulsions are severe enough to dislocate bones. The very toxin that kills also prolongs life, fighting cancer with antileukemia and antitumor properties. Native Americans have long harnessed water hemlock’s potency. The Klamath of the Pacific Northwest tipped their hunting arrows in its juice. The Haudenosaunee used hemlock as a narcotic and disinfectant and elder trees’ bark as its antidote. To become sterile, Cherokee women chewed on its roots for four days in a row. Not only a contraceptive, the parsley family has been used for centuries to stifle male desire and prevent erections. As Ovid wrote, “Yet like as if cold hemlock I had drunk, / It mocked me, hung down the head and sunk.” 

Convallaria majalis
Lily of the Valley

Lily of the Valley can manipulate human sperm cells. Known for centuries as an aphrodisiac, Convallaria majalis contains bourgeonal, an ingredient used in perfumery. Studying in-vitro tests, the Forschungszentrum Jülich with Bonn-based researchers found bourgeonal can mimic progesterone and serve as a chemo-attractant—causing human sperm to swim twice as fast. The olfactive receptor OR1D2 is found in our nose and in sperm. Both bourgeonal and progesterone can activate sperm’s OR1D2 receptors opening calcium ion channels and increasing their speed.

In early twentieth-century France, Lily of the Valley was traditionally sold on May Day. The day was thus christened: La Fête du Muguet. In 1906, perfumer Guerlain, perhaps hearkening to the flowers popularity, created the beloved fragrance Muguet. This first perfume in the lineage of the modern white floral was rivaled only by Muguet des Bois created by Henri Robert for Coty in 1936. The wildly adored Lily of the Valley remained part of the good girl’s olfactory repertoire until 1956 when the master Edmond Roudnitska created Diorissimo for Dior. Reconsidering traditional femininity with a new erotic disposition, Dior’s virginal Muguet added a touch of civet in the background, creating a sophisticated sweet girl aroma that was also a little bit dirty. Dior himself, insanely superstitious, sewed sprigs of Muguet into the hems of his early dresses for luck. All his early fragrances were constructed around this flower.

This vestal plant is also called Our Lady’s Tears or Mary’s Tears.  It is a symbol of humility in religious painting and a sign of Christ's second coming. The plant with the tiny droplet bells and red berries sprang either from the tears wept by the Virgin Mary during the crucifixion of Jesus or from Eve's tears after her expulsion from the Garden of Eden.

Defying its virginal and ladylike image this member of the asparagus family, only masquerading as a lily, is deadly. Just a bite causes headaches, hot flashes, hallucinations, irritability, and red blotches on cold clammy skin. Even the water from a bouquet contains deadly traces of the glycoside convallatoxin. Containing at least thirty-eight cardiac glycosides, steroids specifically affecting the heart, death by Lily of the Valley might look like a heart attack.

Datura stramonium
Jimson weed

Datura felled three armies. The trumpet-shaped flowers turned Odysseus’s men into pigs, and centuries later subdued the starving Roman army with mass hallucinations. During Bacon’s Rebellion in 1676 in colonial Virginia, the weed bewitched hungry British soldiers sent to suppress the uprising. Jamestown colonists spread the word about the psychedelic stupor. One soldier “would blow up a Feather in the Air” and another “dart Straws at it with much Fury,” so naming it jimson weed for Jamestown.

An invasive species, it is found along roadsides and in fields, and its nicknames, too, are widespread: devil’s snare, thorn apple, apple of Peru, stramonium, hell’s bells, locoweed, devil’s trumpet, moonflower, stinkweed, prickly burr, devil’s cucumber…. The leaves’ pungent odor serves as a warning while the flowers’ sweet aroma entices. The plant (especially its seeds in their prickly pods) causes alkaloid intoxication with deadly symptoms: “hot as a hare, red as a beet, dry as a bone, blind as a bat, mad as a hatter.”

Its genus Datura is Latin for “send to die,” which proved too true in colonial Massachusetts. Amidst the colony’s political instability, jimson weed intoxicated pubescent girls, who howled like dogs and encountered apparitions. The Salem teenagers catalyzed such a threat to Puritan decency that, despite knowing the weed’s role in Algonquian puberty rituals, male authorities hanged fourteen women.

Digitalis purpurea
Foxglove

Twice painted by Vincent van Gogh, foregrounding portraits of Dr. Gachet in the asylum at Saint-Rémy, medical use of Digitalis purpurea in late nineteenth-century Europe was undoubtedly widespread. Professionals claimed seventy-three indications could be cured by this decorative flower, including melancholic thoughts, hypochondria, mental illness, and pain, tearing or inflammation of the eyes. One of the world’s most deadly medicinal plants, medical-historiographers suggest van Gogh could have suffered digitalis-induced xanthopsia, an overriding yellow bias in vision and query whether digitalis was potentially associated with Van Gogh’s death.

Used to poison arrows in northwest Africa and cultivated for medicinal uses in Europe, deceptively cheerful foxglove invaded North America during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries with willing European and unwilling African settlers. Concurrently, English botanist-physician Dr. William Withering, prescribed foxes glofa to 156 patients tortuously establishing the efficacy of digitalis as treatment for dropsy, known now as edema or congestive heart failure. Today, globally accepted medical protocol for this disorder includes Digoxin from cultivated Digitalis. Also known as witches’ gloves, fairy thimbles, dead man’s bells, or ladyfinger - the sap, flowers, seeds, and leaves are poisonous. When dried, large amounts of cardiac glycosides are retained. 

Foxglove brings healing or death depending on the dosage. In 1933, a German otolaryngologist murdered his girlfriend. Under the guise of a physical examination, he administered the plant’s cardiac glycoside toxin to her rectally. Between 1988 and 2003 the prolific New Jersey serial killer, nurse Charles Cullen, killed at least forty patients using high doses of Digoxin.

Hedeoma pulegiodes
Pennyroyal

In 1978, an 18-year-old Colorado woman died after drinking pennyroyal oil to end her pregnancy. The amount she’d taken was equivalent to fifty gallons of pennyroyal tea. The mint-like leaves are safe to eat, but the oil contains high concentrations of a toxin that causes liver failure. A midwife would know this. Since antiquity, women have used pennyroyal and its mint family members as birth control. Until 1931, pennyroyal was considered contraceptive medicine in the U.S. Pharmacopoeia—the compendia of federally-mandated quality standards for all medicines. Since legal abortions are becoming harder to get, women are searching for herbal information online—there were more than 200,000 Google searches related to self-abortion in one month of 2017 alone.

With names like tickweed, pudding grass, run-by-the-ground and lurk-in-the-dirt, the plant includes two common mints: American and European pennyroyal. The leaves contain the toxin pulegone, which targets the liver and uterus. The symptoms of being “pennyroyaled” are so prevalent in Northern Ireland, where abortion is illegal, that they served as a plot point in Anna Burns’ Booker Prize-winning novel Milkman. The narrator shows symptoms of poisoning, and her mother suspects the abortifacient. In 2019 abortion rights were finally authorized in Northern Ireland. In the ensuing two years, authorities have failed to roll out services and the few abortion providers available are for the most part run by overstretched volunteer organizations; thus, being pennyroyaled remains on the table.

Helleborus niger
Christmas Rose

Historian Kathryn Utz Tremp determined 30,000 to 60,000 Europeans were burned at the stake for witchcraft between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. 75-85% of the victims were female. As noted in the 1973 essay Witches, Midwives and Nurses, Witch-hunts were a systematic male attack on women. Witch-healers and midwives had been the unlicensed doctors of western history, often the only health practitioners for folk who had no doctors or hospitals but were bitterly afflicted with poverty and disease. Women healers were people’s doctors whose medicine was the consequence of subcultural knowledge passed down from generation to generation. Born in feudalism and gaining in virulence into the “age of reason,” the essence of the witch-craze was a ruling class campaign of terror directed against the female peasant population. Witches represented a political, religious and sexual threat to both the Protestant and Catholic churches. The Medieval Church supported by kings, princes and secular authorities controlled medical education and practice. The hunts constituted a “professional” repudiation of the skills and rights of the “nonprofessional” to minister to the poor. Then, as today, control of medicine determined who would live and who would die.

Hellebores thrive in dying light and cold frozen soil. They bloom in the shadows of December or January. This killer plant featured as a prominent ingredient in Old-World Witches’ flying ointments. Best absorbed through mucous membranes, an unction of herbs in rendered fat was rubbed under the arms and in other hairy places often abetted by a broomstick. Disrupting heartbeats and causing hallucinations,  this member of the Buttercup family gave women the license to fly high.

Assimilation by pious Christian lore neutralized folk traditions: a small girl in the presence of the Christ child began to weep, as she had no gift for the babe. From her tears the Christmas Rose grew. Helleborus niger was transformed into a symbol of innocence. Considered holy, it was now rumored to ward off evil spirits.

Before its holy conversion this flower had been commonly prescribed by Hippocrates to treat insanity and mania. While ancient herbalists used it to heal ailments such as worms, the primary usage was more sinister—poison. Ancient Greeks weaponized heleîn borá, which means literally, "injuring-food". In 585 BCE, the water supply of the besieged city Kirrha was poisoned using heleîn borá. Once consumed, unlucky victims eventually died of cardiac arrest after vomiting, tongue and throat swelling, and a slowed heart rate.

Nerium oleander
Oleander

For more than a century, the story went that one slice of Chloe’s oleander cake killed the Myrtles Plantation mistress and her two daughters. Enslaved cooks, wet nurses and nannies were in close proximity to owners’ families, which fueled fears of poisoning. This hysteria led to laws stipulating the death penalty for any slaves administering medicine or educating another on poisonous plant knowledge. Passing on herbal wisdom became rebellion.

A single oleander leaf can kill a child. The ornamental shrub contains glycosides that cause everything from cardiac abnormalities to visions and seizures. Standard toxicology screenings rarely detect oleander poisoning, making it the perfect weapon. The seeds and leaves have other uses: inducing menstruation and abortion.

Named rose laurel, rosebay and petite pink for its clustering flowers, oleander is native to the Mediterranean and southwest Asia. Its genus Nerium means “water,” from the Greek neros, chosen for its wet habitat. Thriving near the ancient Greek springs, oleander entranced the Oracle of Delphi. After chewing its leaves or inhaling its fumes, the high priestess convulsed in a frenzy as she received revelations. With a divine conduit, poison transmogrifies into prophecy.

Nicotiana rustica
Tobacco

For thousands of years Native Americans have used traditional tobacco (rustica) as a medium of communication with the Creator. Its smoke carries prayers. The sacred plant blesses crops, binds agreements and welcomes guests. Ceremonial smoking of tobacco offers thanksgiving to the Creator for gifts bestowed. The Haudenosaunee use tobacco to communicate with medicinal plants. Offering prayers, they place leaves on healing herbs to share their intentions with the plants before gathering them.

After migrating from South America, the earliest pipe tobacco found in North America dates to 1658 BCE. Part of the nightshade family, tobacco induces hallucinations if enough is smoked or chewed. Tobacco is the name for several species, while tabacum is the tobacco industry’s chief commercial crop. A hybrid species, tabacum is lethal. Its industry was built by ruthless slave labor in America, and the plant’s products kill eight million people each year. The deadly toxin is nicotine. One teaspoon can kill a child. For an adult, 60 mg is lethal, although the body absorbs only 1 mg from a cigarette. Now “tobacco kills” campaigns abound.

The Chippewa are fighting the anti-tobacco movement by growing traditional tobacco (rustica). Until the Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978, laws banned many Native American customs, including traditional uses of tobacco. But the Chippewa continued tobacco prayer rituals with a birch-bark basket of commercial cigarettes for offerings and ceremonies. The Haudenosaunee opted to roll their own cigarettes, tax-free. Each practice a way to keep tobacco sacred.

Phytolacca americana
Pokeweed

Enslaved by the Mitchell family of Virginia, Delphy, a dairymaid and known conjuror was sentenced to death on June 10, 1816 by the Louisa County Court. She had been charged with “feloniously preparing and administering poison” with intent to kill Isabella Mitchell, her mistress. Delphy ground glass and boiled a decoction of pokeroot then mixed the two. Slave healers were familiar with the African pokeweed variety, Phytolacca dodecandra, understanding its dangers and curative properties. All parts of the pokeweed contain phytolaccine and are poisonous, triggering convulsions, bloody diarrhea and vomiting, or death from respiratory paralysis. In her bid for freedom, Delphy was aided by the enslaved house servants, who served Mistress Mitchell the poisonous mixture in her coffee. She suffered violent bowel spasms with excruciating stomach pains. Her son fell ill, and the pigs, fed the leftover coffee, died. Publicly claiming her mistress would be in the ground by the end of summer, Delphy, no doubt, aroused suspicion and eventual arrest.

In the early colonies information was shared between enslaved Africans and First Nation tribes. “Poke” comes from the Algonquian word pokan, meaning bloody. Both cultures knew it as a powerful medicine, hallucinogen, abortifacient, and food. Despite pokeweed’s toxicity, the tender young leaves can be cooked and parboiled two to three times for the Appalachian specialty poke sallet. High in vitamin A, C, iron and calcium, the dish has been an important food and an early spring tonic for poor rural people.

Phytolacca americana has numerous uses specific to women. Its tinctures are used for breast tenderness, menstrual pain and to treat endometriosis, while the berry can stimulate the uterus to induce miscarriage or abortion. Pokeweed’s mitogen shows potential too in fighting cancer, even HIV as an antiviral.

Ricinus communis
Castor bean

Abrus precatorius
Rosary pea

In 2014, British woman Kuntal Patel laced her abusive mother’s Diet Coke with abrin, a lethal toxin that she bought on the dark web with Bitcoin. Abrin, from rosary pea, and a similar toxin ricin, from castor bean, are both considered bioterrorism agents. They assassinate by toxalbumin poisoning: multiorgan failure for which there is no antidote—at least none yet revealed to the public.

Both plants are native to the Eastern hemisphere: rosary pea from India and Asia, and castor bean from East Africa, India and the Mediterranean. Most rosary pea seeds are red and black like ladybugs and come from legume pods. The black and white ones are mistaken for castor bean seeds, which come from prickly pods. Both have been used for millennia in traditional medicine, from ancient Egyptian medical treatises in 1550 BCE up to the present day in parts of Africa, India and China.

Before scientists isolated the toxins in castor bean and rosary pea, women knew their uterine effects. Recommended by the fourth-century Greek midwife Aspasia and used in South Africa and by the Navajo, castor bean oil, roots and seeds (without the deadly hull) have prevented and ended pregnancies. Women in parts of Africa and India have used rosary pea roots and powdered seeds as an oral contraceptive and abortifacient. But today, ordering these toxic seeds might alarm the authorities.

— Lune Ames, Jennifer Kabat, Marlene McCarty

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