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颠茄是一种具有魔法用途的植物，霍格沃茨魔法学校的学生在魔药课上会使用这种植物的汁液。切尔西药用植物园 @Elisa.rolle, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
在英国伦敦的切尔西区，泰晤士河旁，有一群植物被一堵高墙围了起来。这是欧洲最古老的植物园之一切尔西药用植物园（Chelsea Physic Garden），它占地 1.62 公顷，专门用于古老的治疗科学，其中种植着能致人死地的有毒植物，也有能治病救命的良药，甚至许多现代药物都是从这些植物中提取出来的。如果你是第一次走进去，可能觉得它就像一个典型的植物园，脚下的碎石路走起来嘎吱作响，蜿蜒曲折地穿过拥挤的植物片区。但看一眼地图后，你就会意识到事情没那么简单：你的右手边可能是一片“毒床”，植物标识牌上也画有代表危险的骷髅和交叉骨头。“实用植物园”（Garden of Useful Plants）里种着与过去和现在的科学发展有关的植物。而在另一边，则是有毒植物区，种植着其他植物园里不常有的一些植物。例如毒堇（Conium maculatum），一种剧毒的草本开花植物，初夏时会开出伞状白花，相传古希腊哲学家苏格拉底就是喝了这种植物汁液而死的，服用后起初的症状是全身乏力、肌肉萎缩并伴有剧痛，最终昏迷并死亡。毒堇的旁边则是一种名为香根芹（Osmorhiza aristata）的可食用植物。这两种植物看起来非常相似，在它们生命周期的早期阶段，香根芹和毒堇都开着小白花。将这两种植物并排放置是有意为之，代表了植物园最初的建立目的：教导年轻的药剂师学徒如何区分有毒和无毒植物。切尔西药用植物园的历史可以追溯到 1673 年，最初由药剂师名誉协会（Worshipful Society of Apothecaries）建立，位于切尔西曾经的一个果蔬农场中，当时伦敦的这一区域更像是郊区，而不是伦敦市中心。药剂师须要具备识别植物的能力，知道在哪里采集以及如何采集它们，确保他们采集到的不是有毒物种。在拍照识图技术出现之前，药剂师对植物知识的信息储备非常重要。在这里，你会看到有毒的致幻植物天仙子（Hyoscyamus niger），中毒后能使人神经迷乱，昏昏欲仙。曾有四个孩子误将天仙子当作榛子吃了，导致他们昏睡了两天两夜。还有一种名为大豕草（Heracleum mantegazzianum）的植物，能分泌有毒汁液，触摸后遇阳光会导致皮肤起泡，严重时会导致灼伤甚至失明。1722 年，药剂师名誉协会从汉斯·斯隆爵士（Sir Hans Sloane）手中获得了植物园的租约，每年的租金只有 5 英镑，条件是须要向英国皇家学会（Royal Society）提供植物，并且该园区只能作为教学用药用植物园。随着时间的推移，植物园被英国伦敦的城市教区基金会（City Parochial Foundation）接管，而到了 20 世纪 80 年代，它成为了一个独立的慈善机构，并首次向公众开放。多年来，切尔西药用植物园接待过一些著名的访客，例如英国著名侦探小说家阿加莎·克里斯蒂（Agatha Christie）。克里斯蒂住在切尔西附近，经常来植物园里参观学习，在 1917 年，她通过了所谓的助理考试，也就是我们今天所说的药剂师考试，这一资质让她可以在第一次世界大战和第二次世界大战期间发放药物。她在这里习得了大量的植物知识，也学会了如何正确给药。对于克里斯蒂的小说来说，切尔西药用植物园为她提供了大量的“毒药灵感”：她书中提到的植物毒药比当时其他侦探小说家用到的都要多上许多。植物园里还种植了数百种与现代药物相关的植物，这也说明了一个道理，即许多植物在高剂量下会有毒，而在低剂量下却能起到治疗作用。例如罂粟，提取自罂粟的鸦片实际上是用来缓解疼痛和助眠的。益母草（Leonurus artemisia）旁边标有英国植物学家、医生尼古拉斯·卡尔佩珀（Nicholas Culpeper）的描述，他将有关这种植物的知识从拉丁文翻译成了英文：“益母草使妇女成为快乐的母亲，并使她们的子宫正常运转。”还有一种与巫术有关的植物颠茄（Atropa belladonna），俗名包括“女巫之莓”、“恶魔之草”，相传在文艺复兴时期，意大利妇女用颠茄浆果制成溶液滴入眼睛，据说这能起到散瞳的作用，让她们看起来更漂亮，“bella donna”在意大利语中就是“美丽女子”的意思。在《哈利·波特》（Harry Potter）系列中，颠茄是一种具有魔法用途的植物，霍格沃茨魔法学校的学生在魔药课上会使用这种植物的汁液。如今在眼科中，有效化学物质的合成形式仍在用于散瞳，但……[查看全文]
In This Ancient Garden, Plants Can Cure or Kill You
Frances Sampayo: The apothecaries founded this space as somewhere where they could train their students in how to identify medicinal plants from harmful plants—plants that can kill and cure, so to speak.
Shayla Love: In London’s neighborhood of Chelsea, next to the river Thames and enclosed by a tall brick wall, is a collection of poisonous plants that can kill you. There are also plants that can treat you when you’re sick and even plants that many of our modern medicines are derived from.I’m Shayla Love, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. Today we’re paying a visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden—one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe, with four acres dedicated to the ancient science of healing.Love: When I first walk inside, it looks like a typical garden. There’s a gravel path that crunches under my feet and twists and turns through crowded plant beds. But after glancing at the map, it becomes clear I’m in a different kind of garden. On my right is a “poison bed,” where the plant signs also include a skull and crossbones.Love (tape): Maybe we can go to the poisonous plants because I feel like that’s probably a big draw.Love (tape): You don’t see that often in botanical gardens.Love: That’s adjacent to the Garden of Useful Plants, which contains plants associated with scientific developments of the past and present.Love (tape): I’m a science journalist and I was like, oooh, the medical plants, it was just, like, a perfect overlap of my interests...Love: They are devoted to different parts of the body: the heart, nervous system, stomach.Sampayo: This ... here, we’ve got hemlock.Love: That’s Frances Sampayo.Sampayo: I’m deputy director of visitor experience at Chelsea Physic Garden.Love: In the poison bed, Frances is showing me hemlock, a highly poisonous, herbaceous flowering plant.Sampayo: You can see this kind of, like, purple stem. And in the last three weeks this has gone from having all white flowers and small clusters into, you know, kind of the later part of its life cycle.Sampayo: And it’s really dangerous to consume.Love: A hemlock drink, as some of you probably know, is what killed Socrates. Right next to the hemlock is an edible plant called sweet cicely. The two look uncomfortably alike.Sampayo: Yeah, so the leaves are really similar.Love: In an earlier part of their life cycle, both cicely and hemlock have white flowers. The side-by-side placement of these two plants is intentional. It’s a representation of the Physic Garden’s original purpose: to teach young apothecary apprentices how to tell the difference between toxic and nontoxic plants.Sampayo: The garden was founded in 1673 on what used to be a kind of market garden part of Chelsea.Love: At the time this area of London was like the suburbs; it wasn’t central London at all. The garden was originally founded by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.Jonathan Holliday: For them to learn their craft, they needed to be able to recognize plants, know where to collect them, how to collect them, make sure they’re not getting the poisonous bits—not belladonna, in the wrong amounts, that sort of thing.Love: That’s Jonathan Holliday, master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.Sampayo: This is before photography, before Google Identity. So it was really important that people have that plant knowledge of what they were using.Love: Next Frances shows me the poisonous plant henbane, paired with a cautionary tale of four children who accidentally ate henbane instead of hazelnuts—putting them to sleep for two days and nights. Then we see a plant called giant hogweed. There are signs warning that even touching it can cause the skin to blister when exposed to the sun.The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries was given a lease on the garden in 1722 from Sir Hans Sloane, who did his medical training in it. The apothecaries’ rent was just £5 per year, with the promise to provide the Royal Society with plants. And...
Holliday: The other requisite was that this land would only be used as a garden for medicinal purposes for teaching.Love: Over time, the garden was taken over by the City Parochial Foundation. And then it became an independent charity in the 1980s—when it opened to the public for the first time. Over the years, it’s had some notable visitors, such as...Sampayo: Agatha Christie, who is a famous crime writer. She studied with the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and took their exams.Love: Christie lived nearby in Chelsea and was a frequent visitor to the garden. In 1917 she passed what was called the Assistants’ Examination, or a test to be what we might call a pharmacy technician today. With these credentials, she could give out medicine during World War I and World War II.Sampayo: It gave her a huge amount of plant knowledge and kinda how to correctly dose things.Love: And for Christie’s novels, it provided an intimate knowledge of poisons.Sampayo: In her books, she writes about plant poisons, more than any other author, really, at that time, writing crime stories, so yeah…Love: The garden also hosts hundreds of plants that our modern medicines are derived from. And it demonstrates the lesson that many plants that can be a poison at a higher dose, can be a treatment at a lower one.Sampayo: These... we've got poppies here. So opium is obviously used for pain relief.Love: Next to the motherwort plant is this description from Nicholas Culpeper, a botanist and physician, who translated knowledge about plants from Latin into English: “It makes women joyful mothers of children and settles their wombs as they should be.” And there’s an infamous plant connected to witchcraft.Love: During the Renaissance, women in Italy were rumored to have made a solution from the belladonna berry and put droplets of it into their eyes.Sampayo: It was said to make their pupils dilate so that they would look more beautiful. So “bella donna” (“beautiful woman”).Love: In ophthalmology, a synthesized form of the same chemical can still be used to help dilate the pupils.
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