Build Me Up Buttercup: Naked and Deadly Larkspur

I'm working on an essay about larkspur as part of a poetic inventory of Saguaro National Park East. What follows is a little bit about the dark side of the larkspur didn't fit into that piece, but I thought it might be of interest here for those of you with an Amy Stewartish imagination. As for the title, larkspurs fit, rather oddly in my opinion, into the sunnily named buttercup (Ranunculacea) family.

Enjoy:
You can kill yourself with larkspur if you eat enough of it. All parts of the plant are poisonous, filled with a lethal cocktail of diterpenoid alkaloids, including ajacine and delphinine. Cattle go belly up after consuming three percent of their body weight—about 20-25 pounds. As I look out at a hillside in Saguaro National Park East that is sporadically dotted with larkspur, it looks like a bull with a death wish would have to eat every last plant in the park. One rancher concocted larkspur eradication plan involves sending in sheep—which are curiously immune to larkspur's toxic effects—to denude a new pasture before sending in cattle. It's an intractable problem: ranchers detest larkspur, botanists loath sheep. After a drought in 1898 began to kill off sheep herds in the Mojave desert, the botanist Carl A. Purpus (who has a Delphinium species named after him) wrote, "It is a great pity to see the cattle starve to dead on the desert, but it is a frolic for me to see the sheep die."