Early Wednesday morning, while scouting for wild mint (Agastache urticifolia<\/em>), I followed the trail a little farther up the streambank to find a string of brilliant purple flowers growing among the alders. Could this finally be our pea? I hopped over the rocks to pick a flower off and scour our field guide. It had five petals, reflexed backwards, pinnate leaves, a vining growth form \u2013 this had to be it. But the stamens grew in a dense, tangled knot around the center of the flower. That\u2019s strange<\/em>, I thought. Fabaceae has just a handful of stamens and they\u2019re fused to each other.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n We started searching the guide for any kind of purple flowers. Suddenly, Dan insisted, \u201cDrop that thing on the ground right now.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWhat?\u201d I said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cGet rid of it! That\u2019s called monkshood. Haven\u2019t you ever heard of it?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cNo…?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s, like, the most poisonous plant in the West. Eating one flower is enough to knock you dead. It\u2019ll absorb through skin, too.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Holy moly! This stuff is no joke. I did some digging on the internet, and sure enough, the lethal dose of monkshood is about a gram. It turns out its Latin name, Aconitum<\/em>, means \u201cwithout suffering\u201d because its symptoms appear within minutes, and you die within a few hours. People have actually died from just skin contact with it, although all the reports seemed to be from gardeners who planted it (!?) and were working amidst it for hours on end. We hopped in the jeep and quickly drove back to our house to shower off. After scrubbing our hands with every kind of soap we owned and satisfying ourselves that we weren\u2019t likely to die, we headed back out to cautiously get back to work \u2013 and, as any good botanist would do, to get a picture of it for our own plant photo album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n As they say, an adventure is a story that is miserable while you\u2019re creating it and fun to tell in comfort later. And this sure was one of those! Make sure you know the poisonous plants that grow where you\u2019re working and how to avoid them \u2013 and definitely don\u2019t eat things you don\u2019t recognize!<\/p>\n\n\n\n \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n\n\n\n By and large, seed collecting here in central Idaho has been going quite well. We\u2019ve picked bags and bags of fleabanes, needlegrass, wheatgrass, and fiddlenecks. The season has been a bit behind so far, but the last few weeks, our … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.clminternship.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/monkshood-scaled.jpg\")
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