3) White Snakeroot (Ageratina altissima)

Here’s another plant that grows wild, willy-nilly, all over the shop. This little git contains tremerol and murdered Abraham Lincoln’s mother. The way it carried out this foul deed was sneakier than most people give plants credit for. The white snakeroot was eaten by a cow, and then the cow’s milk was drunk by Lincoln’s mother. It basically used a cow as a weapon.

Cows that eat this stuff eventually die too, but not before passing on their tainted milk. This type of milk poisoning effected hundreds of European settlers in America before they worked out what was going on. Tremerol causes muscular tremors, gut beefs and if you’re unlucky, delirium, coma and death.