From the vantage point of my privileged 21st century life, I think back to the time of our earliest human ancestors with terror and awe. How did they figure out what they could and couldn’t eat, what would hurt and what would heal? Walking through a cornfield today, it’s easy to see that corn is meant to be eaten. But thousands of years ago, corn didn’t grow in neat rows or bear such inviting kernels. Ancestral maize seeds were tiny, brown, and hard, borne on plants that look, to the untrained eye, like any other grass. But our forefathers still recognised these plants as sources of nutrition. Or take coffee. How long, how bitter was the process of figuring out that coffee berries must be washed, cleaned, dried, roasted, ground, and brewed with boiling water?

In a literal embodiment of the cliché that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, many plant extracts that in small quantities can save our lives will, in larger quantities, cause death. But when I came across the glory lily in a botanical garden a few days ago, the thought that this plant could help or harm me didn’t even cross my mind. I stopped to look at it only because of its pretty flowers.

Glory lilies have been used across the world to cure all manner of ills, from haemorrhoids to head-lice. Many of the uses that humans found for glory lilies involved killing something, be they parasitic worms or other people. This plant’s potency, serving medicinal or murderous ends, lies in the chemical colchicine. Colchicine interferes with important proteins — tubulins — that make up our cells’ equivalents of bones and arteries.

The glory lily probably produces colchicine for protection, to dissuade animals, all of whose cells contain tubulins, from eating it. But the flower doesn’t benefit from scaring away all animals. In fact, its showy petals exist solely to attract certain animals, which will transfer its pollen to other glory lilies. The combination of the flowers’ downward facing male parts (the anthers covered in yellow pollen) and a sharp upward turn in its female parts (the green style tube ending in three stigmas) make it near-impossible for pollen to fall from the anthers onto its own stigmas, preventing it from fertilising itself.

Some neuroscientists think that similarities in our brains might explain why flowers are attractive to birds, bees, and me. Perhaps our brains see beauty in the contrast of the glory lily’s colours against a green background, perhaps from its symmetry. If I had lived 5,000 years ago, I doubt my brain could have deduced if the glory lily would kill or cure me, but I think that it would still have found these fiery flowers beautiful.

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