Hoodies in the garden

The wearing of a hooded sweatshirt or hoodie became associated with social exclusion, menace and malicious intent during the 1990s. In the early 2000s Bluewater shopping centre in Kent banned customers from appearing in them, John Prescott said he felt threatened by their wearers and a 58 year old female teacher was asked to remove hers before entering a Tesco store.

The purple hoodie'd flowers of Aconitum napellus do nothing to dispel this anxiety since they proclaim the presence of one of the most deadly plants we know of and the sight of them in the garden is a reminder of suicide, murder and accidental death.

Monkshood is its common name but it has a number of others, some sinister (wolf'sbane, devils's helmet) others innocent (old woman's nightcap, doves-in-the-ark). Used first to poison arrow heads, it has been grown by apothecaries and herbalists since classical times for its therapeutic properties, still employed by homeopaths and in Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine today. However (I quote from Mrs Grieve)
All the species contain an active poison Aconitine, one of the most formidable poisons which have yet been discovered: it exists in all parts of the plant, but especially in the root. The smallest portion of either root or leaves, when first put into the mouth, occasions burning and tingling, and a sense of numbness immediately follows its continuance. One-fiftieth grain of Aconitine will kill a sparrow in a few seconds; one-tenth grain a rabbit in five minutes. It is more powerful than prussic acid and acts with tremendous rapidity. One hundredth grain will act locally, so as to produce a well-marked sensation in any part of the body for a whole day. So acrid is the poison, that the juice applied to a wounded finger affects the whole system, not only causing pains in the limbs, but a sense of suffocation and syncope. Some species of Aconite were well known to the ancients as deadly poisons.
It was said to be the invention of Hecate from the foam of Cerberus, and it was a species of Aconite that entered into the poison which the old men of the island of Ceos were condemned to drink when they became infirm and useless. Aconite is also supposed to have been the poison that formed the cup which Medea prepared for Theseus.

The numbing sensation produced by the application of its juice made aconite a very valuable item in pre-anaesthetic days but care was needed in its use: in 1993 staff at a florist's in Wiltshire went down with palpitations and shooting pains after handling a consignment of the flowers. Gerard the herbalist reported that monkshood thrown down before a scorpion would stop it in its tracks. The 17th century scientist Jan van Helmont experimented with it and developed the conviction that the soul was located in the stomach. There is a theory that aconite was what Cleopatra actually poisoned herself with. It has been implicated in a number of murders, most recently in London in 2009, when Lakhvir Singh killed her lover with a curry laced with Indian aconite and was jailed for life.

So, all in all, this is indeed a hoodie best avoided, or, as Keats advised
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist Wolf's bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.