在英國倫敦的切爾西區，泰晤士河旁，有一群植物被一堵高牆圍了起來。這是歐洲最古老的植物園之一切爾西藥用植物園（Chelsea Physic Garden），它佔地 1.62 公頃，專門用於古老的治療科學，其中種植著能致人死地的有毒植物，也有能治病救命的良藥，甚至許多現代藥物都是從這些植物中提取出來的。
如果你是第一次走進去，可能覺得它就像一個典型的植物園，腳下的碎石路走起來嘎吱作響，蜿蜒曲折地穿過擁擠的植物片區。但看一眼地圖後，你就會意識到事情沒那麼簡單：你的右手邊可能是一片“毒床”，植物標識牌上也畫有代表危險的骷髏和交叉骨頭。
“實用植物園”（Garden of Useful Plants）裡種著與過去和現在的科學發展有關的植物。而在另一邊，則是有毒植物區，種植著其他植物園裡不常有的一些植物。
例如毒堇（Conium maculatum），一種劇毒的草本開花植物，初夏時會開出傘狀白花，相傳古希臘哲學家蘇格拉底就是喝了這種植物汁液而死的，服用後起初的症狀是全身乏力、肌肉萎縮並伴有劇痛，最終昏迷並死亡。
毒堇的旁邊則是一種名為香根芹（Osmorhiza aristata）的可食用植物。這兩種植物看起來非常相似，在它們生命週期的早期階段，香根芹和毒堇都開著小白花。將這兩種植物並排放置是有意為之，代表了植物園最初的建立目的：教導年輕的藥劑師學徒如何區分有毒和無毒植物。
切爾西藥用植物園的歷史可以追溯到 1673 年，最初由藥劑師名譽協會（Worshipful Society of Apothecaries）建立，位於切爾西曾經的一個果蔬農場中，當時倫敦的這一區域更像是郊區，而不是倫敦市中心。
藥劑師須要具備識別植物的能力，知道在哪裡採集以及如何採集它們，確保他們採集到的不是有毒物種。在拍照識圖技術出現之前，藥劑師對植物知識的資訊儲備非常重要。
在這裡，你會看到有毒的致幻植物天仙子（Hyoscyamus niger），中毒後能使人神經迷亂，昏昏欲仙。曾有四個孩子誤將天仙子當作榛子吃了，導致他們昏睡了兩天兩夜。還有一種名為大豕草（Heracleum mantegazzianum）的植物，能分泌有毒汁液，觸控後遇陽光會導致皮膚起泡，嚴重時會導致灼傷甚至失明。
1722 年，藥劑師名譽協會從漢斯·斯隆爵士（Sir Hans Sloane）手中獲得了植物園的租約，每年的租金只有 5 英鎊，條件是須要向英國皇家學會（Royal Society）提供植物，並且該園區只能作為教學用藥用植物園。
隨著時間的推移，植物園被英國倫敦的城市教區基金會（City Parochial Foundation）接管，而到了 20 世紀 80 年代，它成為了一個獨立的慈善機構，並首次向公眾開放。
多年來，切爾西藥用植物園接待過一些著名的訪客，例如英國著名偵探小說家阿加莎·克里斯蒂（Agatha Christie）。克里斯蒂住在切爾西附近，經常來植物園裡參觀學習，在 1917 年，她通過了所謂的助理考試，也就是我們今天所說的藥劑師考試，這一資質讓她可以在第一次世界大戰和第二次世界大戰期間發放藥物。
她在這裡習得了大量的植物知識，也學會了如何正確給藥。對於克里斯蒂的小說來說，切爾西藥用植物園為她提供了大量的“毒藥靈感”：她書中提到的植物毒藥比當時其他偵探小說家用到的都要多上許多。
植物園裡還種植了數百種與現代藥物相關的植物，這也說明了一個道理，即許多植物在高劑量下會有毒，而在低劑量下卻能起到治療作用。例如罌粟，提取自罌粟的鴉片實際上是用來緩解疼痛和助眠的。
益母草（Leonurus artemisia）旁邊標有英國植物學家、醫生尼古拉斯·卡爾佩珀（Nicholas Culpeper）的描述，他將有關這種植物的知識從拉丁文翻譯成了英文：“益母草使婦女成為快樂的母親，並使她們的子宮正常運轉。”
還有一種與巫術有關的植物顛茄（Atropa belladonna），俗名包括“女巫之莓”、“惡魔之草”，相傳在文藝復興時期，義大利婦女用顛茄漿果製成溶液滴入眼睛，據說這能起到散瞳的作用，讓她們看起來更漂亮，“bella donna”在義大利語中就是“美麗女子”的意思。在《哈利·波特》（Harry Potter）系列中，顛茄是一種具有魔法用途的植物，霍格沃茨魔法學校的學生在魔藥課上會使用這種植物的汁液。如今在眼科中，有效化學物質的合成形式仍在用於散瞳，但……[檢視全文]
In This Ancient Garden, Plants Can Cure or Kill You
Frances Sampayo: The apothecaries founded this space as somewhere where they could train their students in how to identify medicinal plants from harmful plants—plants that can kill and cure, so to speak.
Shayla Love: In London’s neighborhood of Chelsea, next to the river Thames and enclosed by a tall brick wall, is a collection of poisonous plants that can kill you. There are also plants that can treat you when you’re sick and even plants that many of our modern medicines are derived from.
I’m Shayla Love, and you’re listening to Scientific American’s Science, Quickly. Today we’re paying a visit to the Chelsea Physic Garden—one of the oldest botanical gardens in Europe, with four acres dedicated to the ancient science of healing.
Love: When I first walk inside, it looks like a typical garden. There’s a gravel path that crunches under my feet and twists and turns through crowded plant beds. But after glancing at the map, it becomes clear I’m in a different kind of garden. On my right is a “poison bed,” where the plant signs also include a skull and crossbones.
Love (tape): Maybe we can go to the poisonous plants because I feel like that’s probably a big draw.
Frances Sampayo: Yeah…
Love (tape): You don’t see that often in botanical gardens.
Sampayo: No…
Love: That’s adjacent to the Garden of Useful Plants, which contains plants associated with scientific developments of the past and present.
Love (tape): I’m a science journalist and I was like, oooh, the medical plants, it was just, like, a perfect overlap of my interests…
Sampayo: Yeah…
Love: They are devoted to different parts of the body: the heart, nervous system, stomach.
Sampayo: This … here, we’ve got hemlock.
Love: That’s Frances Sampayo.
Sampayo: I’m deputy director of visitor experience at Chelsea Physic Garden.
Love: In the poison bed, Frances is showing me hemlock, a highly poisonous, herbaceous flowering plant.
Sampayo: You can see this kind of, like, purple stem. And in the last three weeks this has gone from having all white flowers and small clusters into, you know, kind of the later part of its life cycle.
Sampayo: And it’s really dangerous to consume.
Love: A hemlock drink, as some of you probably know, is what killed Socrates. Right next to the hemlock is an edible plant called sweet cicely. The two look uncomfortably alike.
Sampayo: Yeah, so the leaves are really similar.
Love: In an earlier part of their life cycle, both cicely and hemlock have white flowers. The side-by-side placement of these two plants is intentional. It’s a representation of the Physic Garden’s original purpose: to teach young apothecary apprentices how to tell the difference between toxic and nontoxic plants.
Sampayo: The garden was founded in 1673 on what used to be a kind of market garden part of Chelsea.
Love: At the time this area of London was like the suburbs; it wasn’t central London at all. The garden was originally founded by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.
Jonathan Holliday: For them to learn their craft, they needed to be able to recognize plants, know where to collect them, how to collect them, make sure they’re not getting the poisonous bits—not belladonna, in the wrong amounts, that sort of thing.
Love: That’s Jonathan Holliday, master of the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries.
Sampayo: This is before photography, before Google Identity. So it was really important that people have that plant knowledge of what they were using.
Love: Next Frances shows me the poisonous plant henbane, paired with a cautionary tale of four children who accidentally ate henbane instead of hazelnuts—putting them to sleep for two days and nights. Then we see a plant called giant hogweed. There are signs warning that even touching it can cause the skin to blister when exposed to the sun.
The Worshipful Society of Apothecaries was given a lease on the garden in 1722 from Sir Hans Sloane, who did his medical training in it. The apothecaries’ rent was just £5 per year, with the promise to provide the Royal Society with plants. And…
Holliday: The other requisite was that this land would only be used as a garden for medicinal purposes for teaching.
Love: Over time, the garden was taken over by the City Parochial Foundation. And then it became an independent charity in the 1980s—when it opened to the public for the first time. Over the years, it’s had some notable visitors, such as…
Sampayo: Agatha Christie, who is a famous crime writer. She studied with the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries and took their exams.
Love: Christie lived nearby in Chelsea and was a frequent visitor to the garden. In 1917 she passed what was called the Assistants’ Examination, or a test to be what we might call a pharmacy technician today. With these credentials, she could give out medicine during World War I and World War II.
Sampayo: It gave her a huge amount of plant knowledge and kinda how to correctly dose things.
Love: And for Christie’s novels, it provided an intimate knowledge of poisons.
Sampayo: In her books, she writes about plant poisons, more than any other author, really, at that time, writing crime stories, so yeah…
Love: The garden also hosts hundreds of plants that our modern medicines are derived from. And it demonstrates the lesson that many plants that can be a poison at a higher dose, can be a treatment at a lower one.
Sampayo: These… we've got poppies here. So opium is obviously used for pain relief.
Love: Next to the motherwort plant is this description from Nicholas Culpeper, a botanist and physician, who translated knowledge about plants from Latin into English: “It makes women joyful mothers of children and settles their wombs as they should be.” And there’s an infamous plant connected to witchcraft.
Sampayo: Belladonna.
Love: During the Renaissance, women in Italy were rumored to have made a solution from the belladonna berry and put droplets of it into their eyes.
Sampayo: It was said to make their pupils dilate so that they would look more beautiful. So “bella donna” (“beautiful woman”).
Love: In ophthalmology, a synthesized form of the same chemical can still be used to help dilate the pupils.
Sampayo: But today…[full transcript]
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