The deadliest plants in the world do not look dangerous

The deadliest plants on Earth do not look dangerous. That is rather the point of them. Nothing in the design of a plant benefits from a warning label, and evolution has never been under any obligation to make the lethal look lethal.

This is the observation that opens The Big, Bad Book of Botany, in which a writer best known for cataloguing the ways people die turns his attention to the green world and finds it every bit as murderous, medicinal, and strange as the human one.

The garden has never entirely been on our side

People search for the most poisonous plants in enormous numbers, and the interest is not morbid so much as practical. Plants are the one category of dangerous thing we deliberately surround ourselves with. We put them in kitchens, in nurseries, in the ground outside back doors, largely on the basis of how they look.

The book's structure refuses to separate the two halves. The calming cup of chamomile and the pain blocking morphine poppy share pages with the most poisonous plants ever catalogued, because the division between medicine and poison has always been a matter of dose and intent rather than species.

From a high country high to a high class high tea

Humankind has always turned to flora for food, medicine, and mind altering experiences, and the plants have always collected their fee. That fee is the through line of the book. Morphine, one of the most effective pain treatments ever found, comes from a poppy. The same plant family has ruined a great many lives. Neither fact cancels the other.

The Wall Street Journal called the book a fascinating journey through the world of plants, from the beneficial to the deadly, which happens to be the correct order to read it in. Start with the ones that heal you. Work your way toward the ones that would rather not be touched.

Why a death writer wrote a plant book

It is a less peculiar move than it sounds. The author had already spent years assembling Final Exits, an encyclopedia of how people die that won the Bram Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. Anyone who compiles that kind of record ends up noticing how often the natural world appears in it.

The plant kingdom, approached by someone with a mortality expert's eye, turns out to be exactly the sort of subject that repays the attention. This is the world's most fascinating flora as only the author of Final Exits would write it: illustrated, encyclopedic, and honest about the arrangement.

The companion volume

If the garden unsettles you, the animal kingdom offers no relief. The Big, Bad Book of Beasts applies the same treatment to creatures, and the two books were built as companions in format and spirit. There is more on that in the piece about the strangest animals on Earth.

Both sit in the encyclopedic catalog, alongside the reference works that made the author's name.

No botany degree required

The book is built as an illustrated encyclopedia you can open anywhere, written with the same dark wit its author brings to books about death. It assumes curiosity and nothing else. The plants, for their part, assume nothing about you at all, which is the safest attitude to have about them in return.