Learning outcomes:
This course has been designed to enable you to:
- Have a greater understanding of the power of plants
- Identify poisonous plants known only by literary or legendary names
- View in a new light Alexander Pope’s dictum that ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing’
Course sessions:
1. Doctor Shatterhand’s garden is indeed a lovesome thing, God wot …
This course starts by identifying the poisonous plants and their properties grown by Dr. Shatterhand. Under the alias of Dr Guntram Shatterhand a ‘garden of death’ has been created for Japanese seeking death – enter James Bond in You Only Live Twice. We examine the list he compiles of seeds, leaves, fruits and magic mushrooms, poisons for spear tips and much more. Then we observe their deliriant, inebriant, convulsivant, depressant, asthenic and irritant effects.
2. What is food to one, is to others bitter poison – identifying classical plant poisons and practises
Arguably the most celebrated poisonous association is that of Socrates and death by hemlock? Using translations of Greek and Roman writings we will investigate the plants used to kill and cure. The second session will focus on ‘the father of physic and prince of physicians’ Hippocrates and his aphorisms - people that are stuffed up with crudities … must be purged with Hellebore, Euphorbium ... Concluding with Euphorbus, Musa, Pliny, Dioscorides and the legendary mistletoe.
3. Fragrant smells and poisonous hells – plots, poets and paints
As a rural boy Shakespeare knew English country flowers by name and use, in the words of Iago (Othello 1:3) … why the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills … Shakespeare’s plots tend plants and flowers that give his audience hidden messages whilst slaying some of its principal players. Scenes and settings whose echoes we will trace in poets such as Keats and a selection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings
4. Cardinal and moral virtues and vices lost in translation
What did Eve pick from the Tree of Knowledge? Key Biblical plants are first noted in Hebrew, followed by Greek and Latin, for English readers Edward VI’s Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible became the source. We will discuss what is lost in translation. Contemporaneously in the 17th century, the genesis of tobacco, Virginian Gold, named by James the vile custome, whose nicotine-rich leaves created a global demand, vast fortunes and death.
5. Permission to poison – The Poison Garden at Alnwick
The commission to devise plantings that could kill was unusual, the carefully enclosing garden at Alnwick, brimming with living poisons and exciting tales has attracted huge visitor numbers. We will set the historic Northumbrian scene, the landscape and walled garden before examining the contents of this deadly garden within. We will address how visitors can be safely guided through its realm. Which is of the greater value when dealing with poisonous plants - knowledge or ignorance?
Non-credit bearing
Please note that our Virtual Summer Festival of Learning courses are non-credit bearing.
Certificate of Participation
A certificate of participation will be sent to you electronically within a week of your Summer Festival course(s) finishing.
