This is poison hemlock, or Conium maculatum. Its leaves look a lot like flat-leaf parsley, don’t they? That similarity was unfortunate for one man, a Scottish tailor named Duncan Gow. In 1845 his children made him a sandwich for his… Read More
Recently I visited the Poison exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It included a toxicological explication of the witches’ poem in MacBeth, which, by happy coincidence, my son is reading in English class right now… Read More