Books › Wicked Plants
Wicked Plants
The Weed that Killed Lincoln's Mother and Other Botanical Atrocities
235 pages
A delightfully macabre stroll through a garden where every leaf, seed, and vine is out to get you.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like taking a guided tour through a gothic botanical garden with a wickedly funny docent. The pace is brisk and bite-sized, making it dangerously easy to devour one morbid anecdote after another. Stewart's prose is crisp and conversational, perfectly balancing rigorous scientific trivia with a wry, dark humor that highlights the absurdity of human vulnerability. The mood is delightfully sinister, wrapping you in a cozy sort of paranoia as you realize the innocuous shrub in your backyard might be a historical assassin. It is an absolute treat for readers who love morbid curiosity and quirky history, offering a fascinating, slightly unsettling lens on the natural world that will leave you eyeing your houseplants with newfound respect and suspicion.
- Mood
- delightfully sinister
- curious
- cozy-gothic
- slightly paranoid
- Tone
- wry
- macabre
- informative
- conversational
- darkly comedic
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- hidden dangers of nature · botanical history · human vulnerability · the dark side of gardening · morbid trivia
- The writing
- Crisp, witty, and accessible, seamlessly blending scientific fact with morbid historical anecdotes.
- The arc
- Begins with casual curiosity and builds into a delightful, lingering paranoia about the everyday natural world.
- Who it's for
- Readers with a dark sense of humor who love quirky historical trivia and science writing with a macabre twist.
Content notes
- poisoning
- illness
- historical death
- animal death
About the book
A tree that sheds poison daggers; a glistening red seed that stops the heart; a shrub that causes paralysis; a vine that strangles; and a leaf that triggered a war. In Wicked Plants, Stewart takes on over two hundred of Mother Nature's most appalling creations. It's an A to Z of plants that kill, maim, intoxicate, and otherwise offend. You'll learn which plants to avoid (like exploding shrubs), which plants make themselves exceedingly unwelcome (like the vine that ate the South), and which ones have been killing for centuries (like the weed that killed Abraham Lincoln's mother).Menacing botanical illustrations and splendidly ghastly drawings create a fascinating portrait of the evildoers that may be lurking in your own backyard. Drawing on history, medicine, science, and legend, this compendium of bloodcurdling botany will entertain, alarm, and enlighten even the most intrepid gardeners and nature lovers.
Description from Open Library.
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