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Deadly Plants and Fungi: 50 of Nature's Most Poisonous Species and the Stories Behind Them
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Aug 14 2026
Pages: 96
Weight: 0.31
Height: 0.20 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
It sits in a border, or a hedgerow, or a patch of woodland, doing nothing at all - and it kills more people than most of the predators you could name. We are wary of the animals that could chase us, and almost entirely unguarded around the ones that simply wait.
Deadly Plants and Fungi is an illustrated natural history of fifty species that kill by chemistry rather than force. Every entry is accompanied by an original botanical plate in the tradition of the nineteenth-century pharmacopoeia.
Inside you will find:
- The Deadly Garden - oleander, foxglove, monkshood and yew, sold in garden centres and planted along footpaths
- Poisons of Antiquity - the hemlock that killed Socrates, the belladonna Renaissance women dropped into their eyes, the calabar bean used to try the accused
- The Wild and the Wayside - giant hogweed that burns on contact, manchineel that blisters in the rain, the stinging tree whose pain returns for a year
- Deceivers of the Forest Floor - the death cap and its relatives, which cause no symptoms at all until the damage is done
- Blights, Molds, and Famine - ergot, potato blight, and the fungi that emptied whole regions
Each entry explains what the poison does, why the plant evolved it, and the second life so many of these compounds found in medicine - heart drugs from foxglove, chemotherapy from yew, surgical anaesthesia from an Amazonian arrow poison. A closing chapter examines why plants fight back at all, and why the maps of where these species grow are being redrawn.
A natural history, not a foraging guide. Written to inform rather than sensationalize.
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