I fear the deadly pods

There are lots of lovely plants in Hawaii, some native, many not. But one non-native plant that seems to grow everywhere, including my own back yard is the castor bean, or castor oil plant. Sure, everyone's heard of castor oil, and if you're my age and grew up watching cartoons, you may even have heard of Castor Oyl (Olive Oyl's brother).

The Oyl family

But what I did NOT know, and now do, is that the castor bean is one of the deadliest plants and the source of the extremely toxic poison, ricin. Maybe if I had heard the latin name, Ricinus communis, I might have guessed. According to the online natural history information source, Wayne's Word,  "it has been estimated that, gram for gram, ricin is 6,000 times more poisonous than cyanide and 12,000 times more poisonous than rattlesnake venom." These kinds of comparisons are beyond horrifying to me. I imagine on the one hand, being bitten by 12,000 rattlesnakes, and on the other hand, getting stabbed in the back of the leg by an umbrella tip dipped in ricin, like Georgi Markov.

Although the castor bean plant is as common as can be here in Hawaii, apparently it is cause for great suspicion if found growing in Utah, as an Orem man discovered when the plant growing by his mailbox was investigated by Homeland Security. It seems that quantities of ricin have been found in Al Qaeda caves in Afghanistan so I guess it follows that a castor bean plant growing in Orem, Utah is probably a sure sign that a terrorist is nearby.

Now I have a horrible fascination with the plants in my back yard, imagining the sinister-looking spiky pods brimming with poison, just waiting for an innocent passerby to accidentally ingest a seed and die a terrible death. (Although how that accident might come to pass, I'm not really sure - maybe something like how the King of the Elephants ate a poison mushroom and died in one of the Babar stories. Which story, I might add, was accompanied by a drawing of the shriveled green dead elephant king that scared the life out of me as a kid, and made me fear any mushroom not bought in a store). In their FAQs about ricin (??) the Department of Homeland Security assures me that accidental exposure to ricin is "highly unlikely," however, I remain respectfully apprehensive.

The PODS in my back yard!

 

Close-up of the Deadly Seed-bearing PODS!

The PODS try to fool you by disguising themselves with flowers.