Conservatory of Flowers | Amy Stewart

Things are getting wicked in San ­Francisco — horticulturally speaking, that is. Wicked Plants: Botanical Rogues and Assassins opens this month at the Conservatory of Flowers. The exhibit, based on Amy Stewart’s 2009 best-selling book, Wicked Plants: The Weed That Killed Lincoln’s Mother & Other Botanical Atrocities, will include some of history’s deadliest and most infamous plants, such as the castor bean (implicated in the 1978 death of Georgi Markov, a Communist Party defector and a BBC journalist) and the strychnine tree (used by serial killer Dr. Thomas Neill Cream to poison his victims). Let’s just hope the tree that sheds poison daggers isn’t there. www.conservatoryofflowers.org, (415) 831-2090