I’m a huge fan of Amy Stewart, and I’ve read everything she’s written, including her bimonthly gardening column in our local newspaper and her writing at Garden Rant, so I was thrilled when I heard about her latest book, Wicked Plants.
I’m a professional gardener and a total plant geek, so reading all about the wicked deeds of the plants I know and love (and learning some new ones as well!) was a blast. But you don’t have to know or even care much about plants to enjoy this book.
Amy blends the human stories and the plant details with such humor and depth that even the black-thumbed among us will enjoy reading. As she says, “I looked for plants that had an interesting backstory. There had to be a victim – a body count.”
She goes on, “These are plants you do not want to meet in a dark alley.” Indeed not. When I read about Mussolini’s guys chasing Communists down the streets with bottles of castor oil, a laxative made from the beautiful but deadly Castor Bean, I just howled with laughter. Earlier, I’d read with bated breath how the KGB injected a tiny pellet of ricin, from the same plant, into Communist defectors to murder them. I think I’d prefer being chased by the Fascists!
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, and managed to make it good, too?
that was so popular a few years back.
. From the Amazon blurb:
