Deadliest Garden In The World | Earth Unplugged

[Music] what could be more delightful than a summer stroll through an English country garden well this one here in Anik Northumberland is a garden with a difference he has some really unusual features including its very own poison garden containing over a hundred species of plants that have the potential to kill you the poison garden is locked off from the general public by these rather large iron foreboding gates and once you're inside you can't touch smell or even come to close it to some of the most dangerous plants you can only go inside as part of a special tour but today the head gardener Trevor is going to show me around so Trevor everything in this garden could kill me one way or the other yes are there any rules for being in this garden is there anything I need to know well yeah before you actually come into the garden we tell people not to touch the plants not to stand too close to them not to smell them and definitely not to taste them because they all have the ability to kill you or harm you really badly one of the most deadliest is rice and communis and that is this one here the red funky flowers and these beautiful palm leaves this is a very common plant but it produces a beamed and within that being there's a toxin and from that we can extract ricin the deadliest poison known to man ricin pricing and how much rice in would you have to just do a really small amount yeah has to be injected into your system you might remember George Omar cough pointed umbrella tip was shoved into his leg and within that tip there was a little bit of rice in that's enough to kill it was little stab okay what else what else doing here we've got a chopper belladonna cross so a choke of belladonna is a UK plant see find it in woodlands and hedgerows but three of these black shiny berries of enough to kill a child they look so tempting until very very juicy you can imagine children who now don't get out into the environment they're going up in won't know what this is so as a child you see nice juicy fruit bit like a grape pop your mouth but suya enough to kill you Atropa belladonna belladonna Italian for a beautiful lady because Venetian ladies used to collect the berries crush them up get the juice and then drop the juice into their eyes that would make their pupils dilate which they felt was attractive to suitors okay but what does that do to your eyes I can offer a lot of good no because eventually you go blind right okay so the price you pay for beauty when I first heard about the poison guard I just assumed it was going to be something inside a greenhouse because I Eve just assumed that poisonous plants can't possibly grow in my own country there's something that belong in tropical hots different climates but actually it looks like a British English girls in it is and most of the plants that you'll see in the poison garden they're plants that you might find in your own garden I mean with the most common example say is Laurel everybody in Britain has laurel hedges but we've had people coming through the garden saying they've cut their laurel bushes down they've left the clippings in their car and a hot summer's day they've driven to a dump and our windows are maybe been closed and they've had crashes and it's asphyxiated them I guess by focusing on the kale rather than the cure you're giving a platform for some really interesting memorable stories what really interested it is these plants don't kill without human intervention you have to want somebody dead and know how to distill that plant whether you use the roots or the leaves or the fruits of it to kill someone this is a canned item this is a really common plant but the whole of the plant is poisonous and in fact just ten years ago there was a woman called like vinda singh who had fallen out with her lover he'd kicked her out of the house and so she went and collected seed of a canned item she crushed it up went back into the house and popped it into his curry yet his curry and died within 36 hours so very dangerous plant but very common this is another very familiar looking flower I'm pretty sure my mom has this in the garden it's a very common plant but it's bruggman SIA or what used to be called datura though the whole of the plant is toxic very poisonous in fact the pollen used to be tapped into drinks even now prostitutes in Paris are known to use the pollen so when their client comes in they will have some pollen in a drink they'll hand him a drink it makes you go very sleepy so the client will then start to drift off a little bit and then start to hallucinate so during the night he will have fantastic dreams but having wild experiences of this woman and yet in the morning when he wakes up he'll part with his money yet he's never laid a finger on her brutto again is a really common plan but it's phototoxic which means that if you brush against it and get any SAP on your skin you will start to get blisters for me so all I would have to do would be to simply brush this with my hand and that's a third-degree burn that's right yeah especially in a hot sunny day because it's giving off vapors there are some things in this garden that I have to ingest to harm me this one is accidental I'd have to brush past it is there anything we should be actually scared of just walking by well there's a plant further down the garden called henbane we think this plant is responsible for a lot of people fainting at this point of the tour produces these flowers about the size of 50 pence piece which a cream in color and we think that it's that that gives off a very pungent scent and so people will start to feel very faint at this point and so we have a bench against the wall we have First Aiders always on hand you'll come out with water and revive you but normally we will get perhaps three faintings a week and only last week we had three in one day yeah three in one day telling me not to like and now I know this I think I feel funny maybe that's just because like psychologically you're telling me that I could faint yeah we better going to sit down on the bench thing okay first aid at first glance this garden seemed fairly innocent but having had Trevor talked me through just a few of these extremely deadly plugs I am happy to stay well clear and if you've enjoyed this morbid botanical tour then do let us know in the comments below subscribe to earth and plugs and we'll see you soon

Channel: BBC Earth Unplugged

Views: 1,284,628

Keywords: Earth, Unplugged;, bbc, earth;, animals;, nature;, documentary, poison garden, maddie moate, killer plants, plants that can kill you, poisonous plants, poisonous plant, kill, deadily, deadily to humans, deadliest garden in the world, plant poison, ricin, deadily nightshade, alnwick garden, enter the deadliest garden in thr world, The Poison Garden of Alnwick

Id: 2oCWAiqL0i0

Length: 6min 35sec (395 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 29 2017