Boligol - appearance and its properties
The botanical name of hemlock spotted, or mottled, is Conium maculatum L. It belongs to the umbrella family - Apiaceae Lindl (Umbe-lliferae Juss). Hemlock spotted hemlock is a biennial herbaceous plant with large leaves. In the first year of growth forms a rosette of root leaves, in the second year - a strongly branched furrowed stem, which on good soil can reach a two-meter height (more often 70-150 cm). The stem is bare, in thin furrows, with bluish cast, hollow inside, with well visible dark-red spots in the lower part (from what the plant got the name "mottled"), not quite faceted, with powdery patina. The internodes of the stem are tarsal. Leaves are also glabrous, on long petioles, vaginate, with ovate-oval pinnately dissected leaflets on long petioles. A pungent mouse odor is felt when rubbing them.
Hemlock blooms with small white flowers gathered in inflorescences of complex umbrellas. The plant blooms from the end of May to the end of September.
The fruit is a double seed. Fruits are small, grayish-green, ovoid-spherical, flattened from the sides, with wavy ribs. Seeds mature in August through September.
Hemlock is widely distributed: in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, Crimea, the Caucasus, is found in Western Siberia and Central Asia. It grows most often as a weed in crops, vegetable gardens, wastelands, dumps, gardens and parks, near fences and buildings, along bushes, edges, wooded slopes, along river banks, sometimes on fallow lands.
The hemlock plant is very heat-loving: optimal conditions are burdock thickets and littered forest edges. There is abundant evidence that the favorite growing places of hemlock are the so-called bad places, t. е. geopathogenic anomalous zones.
Many folk healers claim that hemlock from such places has maximum healing power. The same, by the way, is evidenced by the famous physician T. В. Makeenko in his article "Cancer is a fatal disease", which was published in the newspaper "People's Doctor" № 5 (123) for March 2002: "I use only wild hemlock, collected in the Pskov region. This is my principle for using herbs - they are much stronger in their wild form, especially poisonous herbs. Their poisonousness depends on the composition of the soil, its temperature, and moisture. And there is evidence for hemlock that it prefers to grow in geopathogenic, ie. е. unfavorable zones and places with increased natural radioactivity.
At the same time, according to some researchers, hemlock growing in mountainous conditions contains much less alkaloids.
Chemical composition
.The hemlock plant contains a large number of poisonous alkaloids: coniine, methylconiine, coniceine, conhydrin, pseudoconhydrin, which in small doses cause digestive disorders and headache, in medium doses - convulsive muscle contractions, and in toxic doses - paralysis of respiratory muscles and death from suffocation. The whole plant is poisonous, but especially the fruits (the sum of alkaloids in them reaches 1%) and leaves. Of the alkaloids, the most poisonous is coniine, which, like nicotine and curare, paralyzes motor nerve endings.
The rhizome of the plant is most poisonous in late fall and early spring. Contains cycotoxin, which has neurotoxic (cholinolytic, convulsive) effects. The lethal dose is about 50 mg of the plant per 1 kg of body weight.
Tannins are also found in the juice, essential and fatty oils in the fruit, flavonoids (quercetin and kaempferol), vitamin C and carotene in the leaves.
In the home, hemlock poisoning is most common when its herb and roots are mistakenly consumed instead of parsley and carrots. This is due to the fact that hemlock spotted hemlock, or speckled hemlock.
(Conium maculatum) is very similar to wild carrot (Daucus carota): both plants belong to the umbrella family and have a fleshy tap root. Poisoning also occurs when eating seeds similar to dill seeds, when clogging beds with vegetable crops. The hemlock plant causes contact damage to the skin and mucous membranes, proceeding as a type of severe allergic reactions.
It should be noted that the entire umbrella family, including the giant Sosnovsky's borer, contains furocoumarins, used in biochemistry for DNA cross-linking, in varying amounts. Not so rare cases when children can be affected: they mistake hemlock for dudnik and make whistles from its stem. After using such whistles, skin cell lesions with persistent pigmentation (due to the action of furocoumarins) may occur on the hands, lips and around the mouth. Cases of poisoning of cattle, horses, ducks are known.
In ancient times, hemlock was used as a deadly poison. All parts of hemlock contain an alkaloid that paralyzes respiratory muscles. It was previously believed that the great ancient Greek philosopher Socrates was poisoned by the juice of this very plant. Now opinions differ: many researchers believe that cicuta in ancient times was not called hemlock, but poisonous veh - a plant also extremely poisonous..
