SOME PLANT RECORDS OF 1959 b y J. C. N .
WILLIS
has been an unusual year for stränge plants. The fabled Upas Tree has sprouted under a new name in the populär press as Datura stramonium. I was told when I was young that no living thing, beast, bird or man, could approach it and live. I have heard that there was once, perhaps still is, a Upas tree in Kew Gardens. I have never seen any corpses lying about there and wonder how the gardeners disposed of them without being killed themselves. THIS
Many people have called, written and telephoned to me about what they call " This nonsense ", that the Thorn Apple is a " NEW ALIEN, deadly poisonous, lately introduced from America ". All we old people have known it all our lives in Suffolk and most know that Gerard got it from Constantinople and "despersed it", as he says in his Herball of 1597, " throughout this land ". It may interest them to hear a little more I have gleaned from correspondents. Mr. Harold Deane, a director of Stafford Allen & Sons, of Sudbury, to whom I wrote after seeing his letter in T h e Times, says it came from Asia Minor and has been cultivated in this country since the 16th Century and that though it is very poisonous it is ridiculous to say it is as dangerous as the Deadly Nightshade. I thought myself that Gerard was not lying about its origin, for the name Datura is Arabic or Indian from the Sanscrit—it is as old as that in the East—and stramonium is mediaeval Latin. If it came recently from America why did it not enter under its American name Jimson Weed, instead of under the 400 year old name that Gerard invented for it ? Mr. Deane teils me that his firm has cultivated it since 1899 at Ampthill and also at Hitchin and Long Melford, but gave it up after the war when foreign competition in the drug stramonium made it unprofitable. Solanum dulcamara and S. nigrum, he says, are generally agreed to be poisonous as they contain solanine which is also responsible for the poisonous quality of green potatoes : this does not seem very dangerous, though there have been reports of fatalities, but in newspaper reports one cannot be sure that the plants have been correctly identified. In belladonna berries it is only the seeds that are poisonous, the juice is quite innocuous. A friend of his once prepared half a pint of the juice and drank it without ill effects. This may be the case with S. dulcamara and S. nigrum, but as far as he is aware no work has been done on the subject.