My Plants


At one time I actually tried to keep track of all my plants. I've totally given that up now. I have no idea what I'm growing anymore.

I have two and-a-half areas of interest when it comes to plants: Herbs for cooking (stuff that tastes good in food) and Medicinal/Poisonous herbs and plants (stuff that you really shouldn't put in your food unless you want it to be your last meal), and Carnivorous Plants. (Which have their own section on my site, even!)

So what is an "herb" you might ask? Well, technically speaking, herbs are non-woody and usually annual plants. In this context, it means stuff like Basil, Rosemary, Thyme, Parsley and so on. It also means cooler stuff like Horehound, Lavender, Catnip and Patchouli. I like plants that do stuff. Whether that means they can be eaten, they smell good, they kill you or they eat bugs, I like plants that aren't purely ornamental.

I also like the "non-edible" types of herbs. Some are medicinally useful like Valerian, Feverfew, St. John's Wort, Skullcaps and Echinacea. I wouldn't recommend someone just eating any old plant I grow hoping it would be good for them, though, some are deadly poisonous. Some of my particular favorites are stuff like Hemlock, Henbane and Wolvesbane.

Wolvesbane (Aconite), one of my favorites, is poisonous in nearly every part of the plant, particularly in the new leaves and roots. Simply getting juice from a broken twig into a cut on your hand can cause local paralysis. If you actually ate some it, you'd go into convulsions, coma and eventually cardiac arrest and respiratory failure. It got its name "Wolvesbane" from the European hunters many many years ago (when wild wolves were still a danger to civilization in central European countries) who would put it on the tips of their arrows when they hunted to make sure if they hit a wolf, it would die. That's pretty damn cool. (Even if it does scare you to try to transplant it when it's grown too big for its pot.) It also has these wicked-looking awesomely deep-purple flowers.

Purely ornamental is boring.

(I always wanted to keep piranhas instead of goldfish as a child, too.)

Something I don't grow, and don't even bother asking me about it, is anything psychoactive. Life is quite interesting enough without external assistance.

Besides, what if I got confused and smoked/ate/sniffed the wrong plant? I like to keep my lungs and heart working for the moment, thank you.


Check out some cool plant links:

  • Gothic Gardening
  • Medicinal and Culinary Herb FAQs
  • Mrs. M.Grieve's A Modern Herbal Online
  • The Tampa Bay Carnivorous Plant Club Official Website
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