Belladonna ~ The Beautiful Lady of the Witch’s Garden

She grows at the edge of things.In the dappled shadow at the forest margin, in the rubble of old ruins, in the disturbed earth beside crumbling walls  –  belladonna chooses her ground carefully. She is not a plant that invites herself into the tidy cultivated garden. She arrives where something has been disrupted, where the ground has been turned over, where the boundary between the managed world and the wild one has become uncertain.This is appropriate. Belladonna has always lived at the edge.Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade, is one of the most famous and most feared plants in the Western magical tradition. She appears in the literature of witchcraft, in the pharmacopoeia of medieval herbalists, in the records of poisoners and physicians alike. She has killed people. She has healed people. She has, according to centuries of folk tradition, carried people between worlds.She deserves to be understood properly. The Names She CarriesThe name belladonna is Italian, bella donna, beautiful lady, and its origin is usually explained by one of two stories, or both simultaneously. The first: that Italian women of the Renaissance used drops of belladonna juice in their eyes to dilate the pupils, creating the wide, dark gaze that was considered a mark of beauty. This is historically documented. Atropine, the active alkaloid in belladonna, causes pupil dilation, and the cosmetic use of the plant is well-attested.The second story is darker. The beautiful lady of the name is not a woman at all but the plant herself . And she is beautiful in the way that dangerous things are beautiful. The glossy black berries look like cherries. The soft, slightly furry leaves have a quality that invites touch. Even the smell, which is distinctly unpleasant to most people, has a strange heaviness that is difficult to ignore. Belladonna draws attention. This is part of her danger.Her scientific name carries equal weight. Atropa comes from Atropos,  the eldest of the three Greek Fates, the one who cannot be turned, the one who cuts the thread of life. It was the eighteenth-century botanist Carl Linnaeus who assigned this name, and he was not being poetic. He was being accurate.Other names she has been called: dwale (an Old English word meaning stupor or trance), devil’s cherries, naughty man’s cherries, devil’s herb, banewort, and in German, Tollkirsche, mad cherry. Each name is a folk memory of what this plant does and what it has done. What She Is ~ The Plant HerselfBelladonna is a perennial herb in the family Solanaceae, the nightshade family, which also includes tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, and tobacco. This family contains some of humanity’s most important food plants alongside some of its most toxic, and belladonna sits firmly at the toxic end of that spectrum.She grows to between one and five feet tall, with large, oval, softly hairy leaves that smell distinctly unpleasant when crushed, musty, slightly fetid, with a strange heaviness. The flowers are bell-shaped and pendulous, a muted purple-brown shading toward green at the base, and they hang in a way that is somehow both delicate and ominous. They bloom from June through September.The berries ripen from green to a shining, lacquered black. And this is where most of the danger lies in folk encounters with the plant. They are genuinely beautiful. They are the size and color of ripe cherries. They are said to taste sweet. Children have died eating them. Adults have died eating them. The berries are among the most dangerous parts of an already entirely dangerous plant.Every part of belladonna is toxic. Roots, leaves, flowers, berries, seeds. The toxicity is present throughout, though it varies...