A Garden To Die For: Wicked Plants At Brooklyn Botanic Garden

The awesome power of plants is on display this summer with Wicked Plants at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, through September 6.

Although plants have nourished and succored, seduced and delighted humans throughout history, this summer, BBG highlights a rogue's gallery of the most nefarious, troublesome, and even potentially deadly members of the plant kingdom.

Wicked Plants at Brooklyn Botanic Garden introduces visitors to over 50 plants in the Garden whose capacity to injure, poison, or perhaps just irritate humans is a powerful reminder to tread lightly in the plant world.

Inspired by the upcoming release of author Amy Stewart’s Wicked Plants: A Book of Botanical Atrocities, Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s summer interpretive highlight gives visitors a closer look at the sometimes problematic relationship between people and plants. In ten areas throughout the Garden, on-site text and the Garden’s first-ever audio tour, featuring its science and horticulture staff, share facts, advice, and tales of close encounters with wicked plants.

Visitors will learn about such botanical menaces as monkshood (Aconitum sp.), a member of the buttercup family used to tip spears for killing prey—and people; ricin (Ricinus communis), an extract of the castor bean that was used to poison a Bulgarian dissident in the 1970s; and the jumping cactus (Cylindropuntia fulgida), which terrorizes hikers by seeming to leap onto clothing or exposed skin.

But singling out the dangerous qualities of plants is only a part of Wicked Plants at Brooklyn Botanic Garden. For every ”villainous” aspect of a particular plant, BBG’s interpretation will shed light on plants’ redemptive characteristics. The foxglove (Digitalis species), for example, tellingly also called “witch’s gloves” or “dead man’s bells,” causes violent reactions when ingested; but the plant is also used to make digitalis, which helps regulate the human heart—a boon to victims of cardiac distress.

Throughout the summer, and as part of the Garden’s Wicked Plants program, visitors will be able to take free guided tours every Tuesday, 11:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. and every weekend at 1 p.m. and 3:00 p.m., led by BBG’s celebrated Garden Guides. Discovery Carts, helmed by teens in BBG’s Garden Apprentice Program, will highlight special selections such as cacti and insectivorous plants. The Steinhardt Conservatory Gallery will feature the artwork of Briony Morrow-Cribbs, who created the original copper-plate etchings for Amy Stewart’s book.

For more information, visit www.bbg.org/exp/wickedplants.