Val Bourne takes a look at toxic plants in the garden

It’s all hands on deck here — the trouble is the hands are all mine and I can’t get enough done with only two!

I blame the weather of course: we gardeners usually do. This year’s exceptionally warm autumn held up the autumn tidy. In any case those areas that I did manage to do at the end of September need re-weeding and titivating again because everything juts kept growing. Oh woe is me, thrice woe!

One of my must-do jobs is to chop the seedpods off my Aconitum x carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’, a handsome late monkshood. If you leave them on you get hundreds of unwanted, inferior seedlings and these look very similar to winter aconites (Eranthis hyemalis), as I know to my cost. One year I got very excited about what I assumed to be a shower of this early-flowering yellow globe, but was soon disappointed when each one gained a foot in height later that year.

This year I handled my aconitum stems with extra special care, having just read about the untimely death of Nathan Greenaway, who is thought to have been poisoned after handling the stems. This young gardener, aged just 33, died from multiple organ failure in early September this year.

His father Richard carried out hours of research to find out why the organs failed, and the culprit seems to be aconitum poisoning, a theory supported by an expert histopathologist. He told the pre-inquest that the plant’s deadly toxin worked so quickly that it would have caused huge damage to Mr Greenaway’s internal organs within hours. It’s hard to prove because the toxin would have been out of his blood system within a day.

Aconitums are probably the most toxic plants in the garden. Florists have been taken ill whilst stripping the foliage, indicating the stems and leaves are also dangerous. The most toxic part is the root and one lady added them to an ex-lover’s curry and received a conviction for murder in 2010. It was the first case since 1882, when a Dr George Lamson poisoned his wife’s younger brother Percy in order to get hold of the family’s inheritance.

Wolf bane is one name, indicating that there’s enough toxin to kill a wolf. Our native, Aconitum napellus, would have grown on woodland edges when wolves were roaming Britain. The other common name, Monkshood, refers to the cowl-shaped flowers and the Anglo Saxon name for this plant was thung, literally meaning poison.The Greek akon means dart or javelin and there’s a legend associated with the multi-headed dog Cerberus who guarded the gates of Hades. The plant sprung up where the spittle from the dog’s mouth fell.

Aconitums are members of the Ranunculaceae, which means little frog. This plant family includes clematis, aquilegia, hepatica, anemone, thalic-trum, trollius, hellebore, delphinium and eranthis, all commonly grown in gardens. The whole family is known to contain protoanemonin, a toxin, but some are more poisonous than others.

I will carry on growing aconitums, but I will be telling my own four young grandchildren to keep away from this plant and not to collect the blue flowers for their rose-petal potions. I shall also continue to wear gloves and make sure that I wash my hands thoroughly when I stop gardening.

Children have highly developed taste buds when they are young and this is a defence mechanism to prevent them from ingesting things that may be bad for them. This is why young children rarely delight in the Brussels sprout. It tastes far stronger to them than it does to us. I think it’s a good thing for a child to have an appreciation that our bodies need to be cared for. We certainly can’t remove all the toxic plants we grow, they are just too many of them.

However, do take care!