Easily confused with : the many different garden varieties that frequently escape onto nearby streams. In fact, I have had such a very hard time finding some that are not garden varieties, and even now I am not at all positive that those photographs taken by myself are the true wild variety. If you know any of these are garden varieties, please write in to tell me.

Distinguishing Feature : The helmet over the top of the lower part of the flower. Monkshood is one of the most poisonous plants in the U.K. All parts of the plant are poisonous not only by ingestion but also by touch, and retain their toxicity even when de-composed. The plant contains aconitine, a neurotoxin, which is capable of being absorbed through the skin and can cause severe respiratory and cardiac problems in man and many animals that come into contact with it. There is no known antidote to monkshood poisoning, so it should be handled with extreme care, or not at all! Gardeners beware! It should not be planted where children are present.

The poison is so strong it was once used as an arrow-tip poison. Aconitine has some (external only) uses in medicine. It is used to treat severe pain, neuralgia and sciatica. Its use internally is so un-predictable and the consequences so dire (there is no antidote) that it is of little use now. Monkshood also contains other poisonous terpene alkaloids, Mesaconitine and Lycoctonine. All parts of the plant are poisonous, especially the tubers where the alkaloids are most concentrated (up to 2%). Mesaconitine is chemically identical to Aconitine apart from one extra carbon atom (on the nitrogen atom). Lycoctonine is also similar to Aconitine but with the Benzoic Acid group (on the extreme left) absent. Some of the same poisons are present in other aconite species, which includes Wolfsbane and Larkspur (Delphinium).

ANY TEXT GOES HERE