Today is Hemlock Day, so here are 10 things you might not know about hemlock:
- There are actually two plants commonly known as hemlock. This post is primarily about the poisonous variety, Conium maculatum, but there is also a coniferous tree native to North America, the Tsuga, often called the hemlock, hemlock fir or hemlock spruce, because its leaves smell similar to the poison variety.
- Poison hemlock belongs to the Carrot family.
- It is native to Europe, but was introduced to the USA as an ornamental plant in the 1800s and was also introduced to Australia and New Zealand.
- It grows in poorly drained soil and can be found near streams and ditches, and also on roadsides and at the edges of cultivated fields.
- All parts of the plant are poisonous to mammals, so farmers need to watch out for it and ensure their animals don't eat it. The toxicity comes from a chemical called coniine.
- It goes by a number of vernacular names, including poison parsley, spotted corobane, carrot fern (in Australia), devil's bread or devil's porridge (In Ireland).
- Foragers need to beware because it can be confused with wild carrots or Parsley. Poison hemlock has a smooth stem with blotches, while carrot stems are hairy. The hemlock plant also grows to twice the height of the carrot plants.
- It may be harmful to mammals, but some species of insect feed on it happily enough. The caterpillars of silver-ground carpet Moths and the poison hemlock moth are among them.
- The Latin name, Conium, may have derived from a Greek word meaning "to whirl" because vertigo is one of the symptoms of having eaten it.
- Hemlock was used as a means of execution in Ancient Greece. Socrates, accused of the capital crime of impiety and corrupting the minds of the young men of Athens, chose drinking an infusion of it as his manner of death. Theramenes and Phocion are two more Ancient Greeks who were dispatched in the same way.
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