Pick Your Poison

Two decades ago, I decided to identify every wildflower that grows on our 40 acres of northern Minnesota woods. It seemed unmindful, even disrespectful, to be ignorant of the names of all those fleeting beauties.

At first it was a bonanza. I spent hours bumping from one plant to the next as blossoms unfurled in spring. My ignorance was stimulating; everything was novel. The search made me realize what I hadn’t been noticing, and how few toys I needed to have fun. I now recognize a hundred flowers, all found within a quarter mile of the cabin.

But as years passed, it became rare to discover a new species. So one July morning I was thrilled to meet a stranger. The flower was growing in our roadside ditch, and I glimpsed it from the window of the truck as I drove by it, thinking, “Wait a second, that wasn’t cow parsnip.”

A few minutes later, field guides in hand, I knelt beside a three-foot-tall plant, ticking off its relevant features. Since it resembled a member of the parsnip family, it was relatively easy to find a match, though the flowers, leaves, and stem ultimately placed it with the parsleys. I homed in on an ID: water hemlock. One Minnesota guide described it as “our most poisonous plant” and warned that children, and cows, had died from eating just a small bit of its root. Another guide also noted its toxicity and the fact that its tubers had been mistaken for parsnips and other edibles, sometimes with fatal results. I also learned that water hemlock resembled poison hemlock, the plant used to poison Socrates.

Final analysis required exposure of those notorious roots. I dug at the base of the stem and drew the tubers from the soil. They looked like a clutch of miniature dahlia bulbs. They may have even looked tasty if I hadn’t read the guidebooks. But what to do with them? I couldn’t abandon a toxin on the ground to perhaps be ingested by a deer or a dog. I considered reburying them, but an animal might be attracted to disturbed soil and do their own digging. As is often the case, a particular knowledge generates a particular responsibility.

So I cut the tubers from the stem and brought them home, thinking to drop them in the garbage or chuck them in the woodstove. But I was suddenly reluctant to discard the root. The urge to preserve it was spurred by the joy of discovery and awareness, and, yes, by the real power of knowledge. It’s a reason people collect specimens of almost everything, to enshrine their learning. On impulse, I dropped the tubers into a pint jar, screwed on a lid, and placed them high on a shelf.

Over the years, I’d learned that many wildflowers are edible. Dandelion greens, for example, make a fine salad, and one of our neighbors once made a batch of dandelion wine from the flowers that rivaled Champagne—at least to our palates. I was delighted when I discovered that chewed wintergreen leaves taste just like, well, wintergreen, as flavorful as mint gum. Flower petals of many species can serve as a colorful garnish on a variety of dishes.

But the hemlock was an outlier. The fact that I’d not discarded the poisonous tubers was a little disturbing. Why keep them? Did I actually covet their poison? No, it was simply the romance of it, the slightly esoteric knowledge derived from paying close attention to the natural world, like a modern-day druid. After a week or so I took down the jar and dumped the tubers into the woodstove, somewhat grudgingly, I admit. But I can always get more. I had the knowledge, and that was the point and the pleasure.

Still, what was the essence of the experience? It began by noticing an unknown, attractive wildflower by the roadside, then acting on curiosity. Not an earthshaking event, but personally inspiring.

Aldo Leopold—forester, naturalist, philosopher—was an early advocate of ecological awareness. In his widely admired book A Sand County Almanac he wrote, “Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins, as in art, with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language.” I felt that subtle tantalization with the hemlock.

We like to learn, are engaged by exploring our neighborhood, and all that’s required in pursuit of such connections is time, attention, and guidebooks.