'The world's deadliest garden' - The Poison Garden in Northumberland - video Dailymotion

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The Poison Garden, within The Alnwick Garden, Northumberland, is unique in being 'the deadliest garden in the world'. Containing more than 100 plants that are deadly to humans, it also has a special license from the Home Office to grow Class A, Class B, and Class C drugs - which is granted under two conditions. Tour guide Barbara Hall shows us around some of the popular attraction’s morbid highlights.

Transcript

00:00Hello my name's Barbara and I am one of the tour guides here at Annick Gardens

00:04and I am one of the tour guides in probably the most deadliest garden in the world. In the Poison

00:09Garden we have over a hundred deadly plants all of which could kill you in various ways,

00:14shapes and forms. This was set up by the Duchess of Northumberland in 2005 the Duchess opened the

00:20Poison Garden. Laburnum tree is the second most poisonous tree in the UK and you can see it is

00:27showing these beautiful yellow golden chains but if you look a little bit closer there's actually

00:31little pea pods. The poison that's in here is sightseeing. When you get these pea pods these

00:36are incredibly poisonous. Four pods would be enough to kill a child, about eight would be enough to

00:41kill an adult. Many years ago they used to plant laburnum trees in primary school playgrounds.

00:46Not a good thing, young children loads of low-hanging pea pods, you can imagine how that went.

00:51All parts of the tree are poisonous, the leaf, the branch, the bark, absolutely everything.

00:55What happens though, the poison makes your pupils react in different ways. So one goes huge, one goes

01:01tiny. We've now removed laburnums from primary school so the last fatality in the UK was in the

01:061970s. Here we have Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade. So what happens is the little pink

01:11and yellow flowers come out first. The flower sits around the little berry until the berry gets strong.

01:16The flower then backs off from the berry and the berries will go green to black. Now there's five points

01:21in the flower and it's associated with witches and witchcraft and they use it to make pentagrams.

01:26Now again, these little berries are very sweet and they taste nice and that makes them incredibly

01:31dangerous. Three berries would be enough to kill a child, about eight would be enough to kill an adult.

01:36So this is giant hogweed. We've actually got giant hogweed and common hogweed here.

01:41You will see this when you're out and about, it is incredibly common.

01:44It will go three meters tall so it'll go to the height of the wall in our garden

01:48and it has big white umbrella flourish shaped flowers so they look like a sort of parachute

01:52shape. It's got a thick lime green stem with purple splodges on it so it looks like it's

01:57being splattered with blood, spiky hairs and jaggedy leaves. Like I say, all parts are poisonous.

02:03But if you get the sap, the juice from the plant onto your skin, that is phototoxic. So what that means

02:08is it will cause a blister like a burn and it'll take a long, long time to heal. But it breaks down your

02:13skin's ability to protect you from ultraviolet light. So when you go back out into the sunlight,

02:17the blister comes back up again. We have a special license from the Home Office which allows us to

02:23grow Class A, Class B and Class C drugs. Now there's two conditions from the license that we must adhere

02:29to. The drugs plants must be in the black cages like you see that are dotted throughout the garden

02:33and also we have to do guided tours. So in this cage here we have cannabis. These are male cannabis

02:39plants. They don't produce any drugs. Females are the only ones that produce drugs. This is all part of

02:44a drugs education program that we do where we go out to schools and schools come into us and we talk

02:49to them about drugs. Here in the garden we have hellebores. Many different varieties of hellebores.

02:54This one happens to be stinky hellebores and it is incredibly stinky. Now hellebores, good for a couple

03:01of things. Helleboreum in Greek means to hot. So the Greek would use it as chemical warfare many years ago.

03:07They would crush the bulbs, put the bulbs where the poison is. They would put the bulbs into the fresh

03:12drinking water wells of the town that were going to invade. These are called purge plants so they

03:16will create a lot of vomiting, lots of diarrhoea. So people would drink the water, become very very

03:21ill and the Greeks could then just sack through the town because there was nobody to fight against them.

03:25But the Victorians had a much better use for hellebores. They would make hellebore tea and they

03:32would give it to children who were suffering from tapeworms. Now bearing in mind if you have a tapeworm,

03:37your tapeworm is five times your height. So my tapeworm would probably be about 30 foot long.

03:42You would drink the hellebore tea, the child would drink the tea, and the tapeworm doesn't like it.

03:47So it would come out in the vomit. You would then have to roll it up and roll it up and roll it up

03:51and hope it doesn't snap otherwise it goes back down inside. That's not the worst part. When you are

03:56asleep your tapeworm comes out of your bottom and it has a little bit of a look around. And if you're

04:01having a little bit of a bad nightmare and nip your bum tight well you will nip a little bit of tapeworm off.

04:06So always check your bed to see if there's any little white waxy curly bits because that could

04:10be part of your tapeworm. That's not the worst thing either. Also when you're asleep your tapeworm

04:15comes out of your bottom and has a little bit of a look around and if there's anybody lying next to

04:19you well your tapeworm could go and have a little look at them as well. So this is a laurel tree.

04:24Now it's used on many new estates and stuff a lot of people have laurel hedging it's absolutely fine.

04:29But the problem you've got is within the leaves. Within the leaves are two components separately they're

04:34absolutely fine. Mix them together i.e cut through with a hedge trimmer activates them and they

04:38release cyanide gas. The problem you've got is is if you get the clippings from the laurel that you've

04:44used that day and you put them say into a black bin liner and you put them in the boot of your car and

04:48you are going to go to the tip to dispose of them. Now this happens on average five times over 12 months

04:53in the UK. The person puts the the clippings into the boot of their car and then they get distracted have

04:58a cup of tea somebody calls them whatever three four five hours you now have a great big bag of

05:03cyanide in the boot of your car. If you get into your car cyanide stops the passage of oxygen across

05:08your blood and puts you to sleep very quickly. If you have a road accident a fatal road accident

05:12emergency service personnel will come open the doors. Cyanide is lighter than air so it will

05:17dissipate so you can have a fatal road accident and people don't know what's going on when in actual fact

05:22you've got a big bag of laurel in the back of your car. Also we would suggest don't burn it

05:27otherwise that releases a cyanide gas and you could end up poisoning your neighbours unless that's how

05:31you roll we're not really quite sure. So this is laurel be extremely careful with it cut it through

05:36the stems cut it when that when the wind's moving the air's moving if you do transport it we would

05:41suggest keep your car windows open and be very careful if you can start to smell Christmas cakes.

05:46So this is a yew tree the most poisonous tree in the UK 25 grams of these little spiny needles would be

05:53enough to kill an adult but the tree's name is Taxos now from that we can get Taxol and Taxine which are

05:59two of the major components in breast cancer medication so this tree could kill you or this

06:03tree could save somebody's life. It has little red berries and the pip is inside the berry all parts of

06:09the tree are poisonous other than the flesh of the red berry. Now I'm aware of somebody who ate two red berries

06:17meant to spit the pips out got distracted and ate the lot so that person collapsed on

06:22Wilson all the rest of it white of his eyes went completely red after three weeks his poo was blue

06:28five weeks still had the toxins in his body. This is another one associated with witches and witchcraft

06:32if you can drink a little diluted brew from the spines it is hallucinogenic and you think you can fly

06:37so all witches broomsticks are made out of you and also medieval longbows they're all made out of you as

06:43well but you might associate this with graveyards now people think it's to keep the animals away

06:48absolutely not spooky story time hundreds of years ago we were pagans and we actually worshiped the

06:54tree what we believed then was if we planted the tree next to where we bury our dead the roots of

06:59the tree are very thin and spindly we believed that the roots would go down grow into the eye sockets of

07:04the dead people to keep them down in the ground to stop them from coming back to haunt the village

07:08religions came along put a wall around it called it a church in a churchyard

07:12you grow for thousands and thousands of years the tree was probably there way before

'The world's deadliest garden' - The Poison Garden in Northumberland

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