(perky music)
- Atropa belladonna will kill you.
Datura will put you to sleep, forever.
Aconitine will kill you.
Laurel will produce cyanide and kill you.
Every plant here in the Poison Garden is poisonous
and has the ability to kill you.
My name's Trevor Jones and I'm the head gardener
of Alnwick Garden.
This plant is giant hogweed.
It will get up to around about eight foot high.
It's phototoxic, so it will burn your skin
and give you blisters for up to seven years.
This garden is set in the war garden of the old castle
in Northumberland, U.K.
We have around about 95 plants
and we're adding to the collection all the time.
This plant is aconitine, or monkshood.
Wonderful blue flowers, but the whole of the plant
is poisonous.
The berries crushed up and fed to you will kill you.
The leaves themselves will kill you also,
as will the root and the stem.
We have to obviously maintain the garden,
so we have to tend the plants, and when we do that
we have to be very careful of the way we operate,
so we have to cover some of our skin
when we deal with particularly dangerous plants.
This plant is laurel.
It produces cyanide, and we all know what that'll do to you.
So it was the brainchild of the duchess,
the Duchess of Northumberland,
so rather than having a herb garden,
she decided to create more interest
and have a poison garden.
They're very very common plants.
In fact, a lot of them are what we call
cottage garden plants, and they're grown
in many people's gardens, but people don't know
how harmful they actually are.
This is atropa belladonna.
Four berries are enough to kill a child.
People are intrigued by poisonous plants.
I'm often very worried when they come out
because many of them will be growing these plants at home,
and they don't realize the powerful impact
plants can have on us as humans.
- Definitely.
- It's a good way to get rid of your wife. (chuckles)
I don't know.
(laughter)