Suburban Grandpa Defeats Harry Potter’s The Devil’s Snare
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At first he was simply curious but after it had grown five feet in three months he and his wife decided it was time to act.
Better known as Jimson Weed or Thornapple, the plant was initially identified as Devil’s Snare from the Harry Potter books!
A cousin of Deadly Nightshade, it is commonly used as a poison by Central American hunters and a hallucinogen by Indian monks.
Experts believe seeds travelled up to 6,000 thousand miles in a bird’s stomach before escaping over the UK in a fresh batch of guano. (It’s a wonder the bird could fly straight — or fly at all!)
However the couple weren’t interested in the plant’s magical powers or hunting uses and quickly cut it down.
Quite right too. After all, you wouldn’t want Grandpa trying to improve neighbour relations at the end of a poisoned spear, would you?!
Picture Credit: Husband humors his wife with “pig hunting” by quinn.anya from flickr under Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License.
I’m sure a lot of Brits would have wanted that hallucinogen.
Well the plant is used by Hindu monks as such and could probably be considered a cultural item, much the same as cannabis for rastafaris. Time to swap belief perhaps?
Sounds rather silly to me to suspect that it has grown from a seed which a bird had dropped…it’s commonly grown as a conservatory plant in the uk so it’s more likely that it’s from a local source
Although considered only a rare accidental in the UK, it’s widespread in parts of France. I agree with you Carl, but what can either of us do when confronted with “experts”
I presume this story is based on the Daily Telegraph’s story of 6 Aug (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/5983776/Deadly-tropical-plant-grows-in-Suffolk-garden.html), plus a few colourful bits of random speculation (the RHS experts weren’t suggesting that the bird had flown from South America!). But why have you turned Suffolk pensioner Phyllis Abbott, 79, into an 84-year-old grandpa? Was it because you had a free picture of an oldish bloke with a spear-like object in his hand?