Talks about The Poison Garden
Introduction
It's often said that the best problems to have are the problems of success and, happily, all the Alnwick Garden Poison Garden's problems were those of success.
The original intention, while I was still a volunteer with no voice in the organisation, was to ask volunteers to work two hour sessions taking ten visitors at a time around the garden. When I demonstrated that this required a pool of 300 volunteers all fully trained, it was decided to allow visitors to wander around the garden with members of staff on hand to answer questions. This completely failed to satisfy the curiosity and, in 2006, I was allowed to employ sufficient staff to offer every visitor a guided tour.
Those tours, however, proved so popular that they had to be restricted to around twenty minutes which could only pick out a small selection of the plants and their stories and left many visitors wanting more.
A Talk about All the Plants
It was clear that visitors wanted to know more and the book which was then being sold about the Alnwick Garden Poison Garden only gave very limited information, much of it not wholly reliable.
My first intention to address this problem was to give a talk covering all the plants in the Poison Garden but it soon became clear that such a talk would run for a couple of hours. I decided to fragment the subject and it seemed logical to do that division by a topic area.
Out of that came the present package of five talks but there are a number of other areas which would lend themselves to a separate talk and the programme is likely to increase.
The following is a brief insight into the five talks so far on offer. Please see the right-hand column for details of how to book one of these talks for your organisation.
Lethal Lovelies
This is as close to an all encompassing talk as it is possible to get without going over the forty-five minutes to an hour time span which seems to be the norm for most purposes.
The basis of the talk is to look at the three ways to avoid being harmed by a poisonous plant; don't touch, don't eat, don't sniff. This is followed by a look at the most notorious of the plants and a brief overview of the issues surrounding the misuse of the substances the psychoactive plants contain.
The actual plants featured are mostly the same but the time spent on each and the stories told vary from talk to talk and there are people who have heard 'Lethal Lovelies' more than once and say that the two talks were quite different.
Medical Murderers
There is something ghoulish in all of us so it isn't surprising that many people want to hear about the use of poisonous plants as a murder weapon.
Again, to try and cover all the many ways the plants have been used to kill would produce a training course not a one off talk so I decided to focus on the medical professionals who have used the plants as their weapons.
This does more than simply restrict the territory to be covered so that the talk can be kept to a reasonable length. As our knowledge grows it becomes more difficult to obtain and use both the plants and the extracts from them so, increasingly, poisoning is the domain of the expert and, by limiting the theme to medically trained murderers, it is possible to include the most famous serial killer of the 20th century.
But there is more to 'Medical Murderers' than just satisfying ghoulish curiosity. By asking why and how these killers were able to function, the talk is also a thought-provoking look at what we believe and why we trust some people and not others.
Murderous Morphine
Click on the arrow to watch a short video edited from the full Medical Murderers talk concentrating on the use of morphine as a murder weapon.
Who Wants to be a Murderer?
Though drawing on a number of the cases used in 'Medical Murderers', the approach of this talk is a little more light-hearted and, in particular, looks at the historical reaction to death which enabled so many murders to go undetected. It also questions our complacency and asks whether murder could still be all around us.
The 'Phantastica'
'Phantastica' is a term coined by Doctor Louis Lewin to embrace all the substances, mostly plant derived, which affect the human brain in any way.
This talk is about the best known of those plants and looks at why we use them, how we use them and what the real harms they can cause are as opposed to those harms which exist only in the headlines.
Though dealing with a serious subject, the talk has its lighter moments and is an entertaining way to get the audience thinking for themselves about the issues surrounding substance abuse.
It is suitable for all age groups and has held the attention of teenagers and grandparents alike.
War and Remembrance
This is a more specialised talk intended for use around the time of November 11th and Remembrance Sunday. It looks as the plants which have had a role in warfare, or the justification for waging war, and follows a timeline from the Roman invasion of Britain through to the present 'war on terror' and the troops fighting in the poppy fields of Afghanistan.
Other Talks
There are a number of other subject areas which could easily be covered. Everything from plants in the Bible, in Shakespeare, in literature generally to plants that poison horses or other specific animals. In time, more of these subject areas will become the topic for a talk.
