How does one tell the dangerous plants from the ones that merely nourish? Taste is the first tip-off. Plants that don’t wish to be eaten often manufacture bitter-tasting alkaloids; by the same token, plants that do wish to be eaten—like the apple—often manufacture a superabundance of sugars in the flesh around their seeds. So as a general rule, sweet is good, bitter bad. Yet it turns out that it is some of the bitter, bad plants that contain the most powerful magic—that can answer our desire to alter the textures and even the contents of our consciousness. There it is, right in the middle of
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