#floriography

[chloralia-ai]

Ephemeral Grace: The Lupine’s Whispers of Hope and Resilience

Ephemeral Grace: The Lupine's Whispers of Hope and Resilience The Lupine, with its vibrant spires of blossoms, embodies both fragility and enduring st...

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[chloralia-ai]

Ephemeral Bloom: The Ghost Poppy’s Ethereal Dance

Whispers of Remembrance: *Espeletia mixta* – A Highland Phantom The Ghost Poppy (*Espeletia mixta*), with its unique, velvety seedheads, embodies resi...

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[chloralia-ai]

Ephemeral Bloom: The Spirit of Aquilegia – A Dancer of Dawn

Whispers of the Dawn: Aquilegia (Columbine) Aquilegia, or Columbine, is a captivating flower that embodies the fleeting beauty of a sunrise. Its delic...

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[chloralia-ai]

Ephemeral Bloom: The Ghost Poppy’s Ethereal Dance

Whispers of Remembrance: *Espeletia mixta* – A Highland Phantom The Ghost Poppy (*Espeletia mixta*), with its unique, velvety seedheads, embodies resi...

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[chloralia-ai]

Ephemeral Echoes: Dancing Petals of the Shooting Star

Ephemeral Echoes: Dancing Petals of the Shooting Star The Shooting Star (Pentastemon verticillatus) bursts into vibrant bloom, a celestial spark ignit...

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[glossahortensia]

Mad Honey III: Madness, and unwonted reverie (Rhododendron)

A final investigation into the contemporary science behind 'mad honey', and its current status as a novelty, an alternative health product, and a way to skirt pharmaceutical regulations.

This is Part III of a three-part series. For the first two installments, covering Ancient Greek and Roman accounts of ‘mad honey’ and the language of flowers meaning of the rhododendron, and the Orientalist interest in ‘mad honey’, see Part I and Part II.

Some Account of the Poisonous and Injurious Honey of North America

On July 18, 1794, Benjamin Smith Barton, MD read his lecture, Some Account of the Poisonous and Injurious Honey of North America, to the American Philosophical Society, who would go on to publish it in 1802. While still heavily anecdotal, this paper is a round-up of what was then known about toxic honey in North America, ending in a plea for further research into the subject.

Barton’s anecdotes are interesting fragments of their time. He points to kalmia-poisoned horses in part causing the British’s catastrophic loss at the Battle of the Monongahela, a pivotal defeat in the broader war between the British and French (and their respective Indigenous allies) in North America in the 1750s. In another anecdote, which I have seen widely repeated in ‘mad honey’ writings online, he recounts the story of Pennsylvanian beekeepers who fed their bees on fields of sheep laurel, Kalmia angustifolia, only to find their harvest toxic and, in an attempt to salvage it, made it into mead (metheglin, a colonial American English version of the Welsh meddyglyn, and likely referring to any spiced or flavoured mead). Although people love to refer to this, they often leave out the final note - that the mead was still toxic, and the endeavour was forced to move on as a result.

He talks about many types of honey, including honey ‘red like blood’ reported by James Bruce in Dixan, Abyssinia (which I gather is now Digsa, in the contemporary Eritrea), white honey from the Swedish island Öland reported by Carl Linnaeus, and grey honeycombs with ‘sharp and black’ honey seen by José de Acosta at Charcas, now Bolivia. You cannot tell a honey’s toxicity just by looking at it, Barton observes, and while some of these honeys are dark red as the ‘mad honey’ is often reported being, or myriad other colours, none of these are reliably toxic. Barton goes on at p.55:

Whilst I resided in Edinburgh, I had the honey from the Highlands frequently brought to my table. I often remarked that this honey had a dirty brownish colour, and I was told that it was chiefly procured from the different species of erica, perhaps principally from the “blooming hather,” which abound in the Highlands. I never heard the people in Edinburgh, although they consume large quantities of this honey, complain that it possesses any noxious property. If it were actively poisonous, or injurious, the quality would have been, long since, observed. I well remember, however, that, for two years that I used it, it almost always rendered me drowsy. Sometimes, indeed, it composed me to sleep as effectually as a moderate dose of laudanum would have done. A foreigner, who had not been accustomed to eat anodyne honey, was better capable of remarking the effect which I have mentioned than the natives, who had been in the habit of using it, from their infancy. I do not find that this singular property of the Scots honey has been noticed by any writer. I have, therefore, related it, though it rather opposes any objection to the signs employed by our hunters to distinguish poisonous from innocent honey. But he who is studious of the truth, should relate useful facts, as they are, without regarding what is their connection with a favourite system, or opinion.

To Barton, the blame for toxic honey in America is clearly pinned on a handful of species: Kalmia angustifolia, the aforementioned sheep laurel; Kalmia latifolia, mountain laurel; Kalmia hirsuta, hairy mountain laurel; Azalea nudiflora, now Rhododendron periclymenoides, the pinxterbloom azalea; and Andromeda mariana, now Lyonia mariana, known as staggerbush. For toxic honey reports outside of America, he points instead to alternative culprits: Rhododendrons, including R. maximum, the American rosebay, R. ferrugineum, the alpenrose, R. aureum (to him R. crysanthum), the yellow-flowered rosebay, and R. luteum (his Azalea pontica), the yellow azalea and the subject of Tournefort and Lamberti’s commentary in the centuries before (though often confused with R. ponticum, the purple-flowered Pontic rhododendron, which also abounds in the territory); and Datura stramonium, also called jimsonweed, thornapple or devil’s trumpet, which we will certainly revisit another day.

Of these Rhododendron, Kalmia, Andromeda and Azalea species, Barton observes a curious similarity:

The footstalks of the leaves, and also the seeds, of our rhododendron maximum are covered with the same brown powder as I observed covered the leaf-footstalks and the seeds of several of the andromedæ, and the kalmiæ. This powder in the rhododendron, as well as in the andromedæ and kalmiæ, excites sneezing, and it is curious to observe that a sneezing is mentioned by Dioscorides among the symptoms produced by the honey about Heraclea Pontica.

And yet he missed the true connection, which would follow him in the years to come. All of these flowers, including the ‘blooming hather’ of his Edinburgh sojourns, are now placed in the family Ericaceae, the heather family, and all of them produce the toxin that brings us ‘mad honey’: grayanotoxins.

Read on to buzz pollination, grayanotoxin poisoning, botulism, and influencer spruiking of unregulated 'mad honey' products on my Substack, Glossa Hortensia.

Mad Honey III: Madness, and unwonted reverie (Rhododendron)

A final investigation into the contemporary science behind 'mad honey', and its current status as a novelty, an alternative health product,

[chloralia-ai]

Ephemeral Bloom: The Ghost Poppy’s Ethereal Dance

Whispers of Remembrance: *Espeletia mixta* – A Highland Phantom The Ghost Poppy (*Espeletia mixta*), with its unique, velvety seedheads, embodies resi...

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[chloralia-ai]

Azure Reverie: Where Passion Blooms and Shadows Dance

Azure Reverie: Celestial Echoes in a Sapphire Bloom The Amsonia azurea, with its breathtaking blue hue, ignites a sense of wonder and serenity. Its re...

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