Chelsea Physic Garden
The Chelsea Physic Garden is a botanical garden in London originally founded in 1673 by the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries as the Apothecaries’ Garden. It was intended to grow plants to be used as medicines.
I made it to London for the first time a couple of years ago and visited the Chelsea Physic Garden after the annual Chelsea Flower Show. Had I read “Wicked Plants” before visiting Chelsea Physic Garden, I would have appreciated it even more.
Amy says plants are living green chemical factories. They make these chemicals for their own purposes. “They’re not thinking about us. They’re doing it for themselves,” she says.
Plants may produce chemicals to defend themselves against predators or to attract pollinators, among other reasons.
“Some of those chemicals happen to be really useful as medicines,” Amy says, though she points out that, like many medicines, they are helpful in the right dose and dangerous in the wrong dose. “There’s a very thin line between medicine and poison.”
People living in London hundreds of years ago would go to an apothecary when sick, and all the apothecary had to offer to soothe symptoms was plants, maybe dried up or soaked in alcohol to extract the chemicals and keep them shelf stable.
“You had these pharmacists who were just handing out plants to people and hoping that would work, and usually it didn’t,” Amy says.
Sometimes, the plants did work, so keeping them on hand was a priority.
“The Chelsea Physic Garden was a place where those plants could be grown and where pharmacists could look at them and identify them,” Amy explains. Back then the next best thing to seeing an actual plant was a drawing or a woodcut of that plant in a book — and books were not easy to get your hands on.
“Being able to see the real plant was extraordinarily useful for those folks, and they also kept a garden of poisonous plants,” she says, explaining that by keeping poisonous plants around to familiarize themselves with, they knew which plants to never give out.
“The Chelsea Physic Garden is still there today, and all of those things still exist inside that garden. So it is this amazing experience of time travel to go to the Chelsea Physic Garden. It also really makes me appreciate the drugstore down the street. It’s like, ‘Thank you, Walgreens. I probably don’t say it often enough. Super glad you’re there.’”