The Upas Tree, Antiaris toxicaria, is truly a dendrological wonder. One claim has that the effluviant can kill a man at fifteen miles. Yet the wood is valued for veneers and the fruit, soft and edible, has been spread by humans since antiquity.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely you will want it as a houseplant or in your conservatory. No, not because of its fatal vapours. 'Upas' is from a Javanese word for 'poison.' The sap is just that, highly poisonous containing cardiac glycoside. For eons it has been utilized to anoint arrows, darts and blow darts with fatal results to the recipients.
Native to tropical southeast Asia, it is now widely distributed throughout the Old-World tropics from Africa to Australia and through many of the Pacific islands. The seeds have been spread by bats and birds, as well as deer, antelope, monkeys, possums and, of course, people.
The fast-growing tree, a member of the Moraceae family – mulberry and fig – may reach 40 metres. Mature in just 20 years, the bark is a source of 'cloth.' It is also high in tannins and so used in traditional cloth dyeing and paints. The lightweight wood, as mentioned is used for veneer. All of which activities, one must assume, avoid contact with the deadly sap.
The Upas Tree's alleged properties are another matter. In this age of jaded international tourism and equally jaded tourists, it is easy to overlook the sense of wonderment as early explorers reported back from lush rain forests and exotic islands. But just as today the travel industry is wont to stretch the truth, so factual reporting was not always prominent in those bygone days.
However, the basis for the fable of the Upas Tree has been traced back to man who never left England. Besides being a respected Shakespearean critic, George Steevens (1736-1800) was a notorious practical joker of his times. Educated at Eton College and King's College, Cambridge (which he left without a degree), he wrote an entirely fictitious account of the Java Upas Tree, derived from an imaginary Dutch traveller, a surgeon named Foersch. It was published in the London Magazine in December 1783, claimed translated in 1775 from the Dutch.
The account attracted naturalist Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin. His famous poem, Loves of the Plants, appeared in 1789, containing the lines:
On the blasted heath
Fell Upas sits, the hydra-tree of death.
This set off a slew of elaborate allusions. Fact was ignored in preference to literary licence.
Lord Byron, commemorated by former lover Lady Caroline Lamb as, "mad, bad and dangerous to know," described in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1817):
The harmony of things – this hard degree,
Thus uneradicable taint of sin,
This boundless upas, this all-blasting tree,
Whose root is earth, whose leaves and branches be.
Unsurprisingly such grim forebodings appealed mightily to Russian writers such as Alexander Pushkin. He devoted an entire work, The Upas Tree (1832) to such, giving an almighty boost to the growing legend.
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No bird flies near, no tiger creeps,
Alone the whirlwind, wild and black,
Assails the tree of death and sweeps
Away with death on its back
Writers couldn't seem to resist working the tall travellers' tales into their works. There were enough stories to cause their readers to shudder. It was believed that the Upas Tree exhaled a poisonous aroma, the breathing of which caused death. It was the most poisonous in world – no one could reach the trunk without falling dead – or was that within 10 miles of it without dying? So how was such a virulent poison obtained? Some said it could only be harvested by condemned criminals wearing leather hoods fitted with glass eyeholes and even with such precautions scarcely a tenth of them returned alive.
In her Jane Eyre (1847), Charlotte Brontë maintained that "concealing the mad-woman's neighbourhood from you, however, was something like covering a child with a cloak and laying it down near an upas-tree: that demon's vicinge is poisoned, and always was."
Herman Melville created an entire poison landscape in Mardi (1849). "Farther on, there frowned a grove of bended banian boughs, thick-ranked manchinees, and many a upas, their summits gilded by the sun, but below, deep shadows, darkening night-shade ferns, and mandrakes."
The great Charles Dickens claimed that "the deadly upas tree of Java had blighted him" in Martin Chuzzlewit (1844), returning to the subject in his beloved Little Dorrit (1857), writing that is was "as if an Upas tree had been made a capture."
Even the popular science magazine, Scientific American, stepped in a year later when, on 31 July 1858, it published 'The Upas Tree.' And yes, that publication dates back that far in time.
Still writers couldn't stay away from this horticultural wonder. Irish John Boyle O'Reilly's The Upas Tree (1879) has a character saying, "I fear my upas roots have led me out of bounds." A Russian successor to Pushkin, one Fyodor Sologub got into the act in 1908: "The juices of these plants have been mixed with the poisonous pitch of the upas tree." The wonderful mind of H. P. Lovecraft, creator of weird fiction and fantasy had it that, "In the valley of Nis the accursed waning moon shines thinly, tearing a path for its light with feeble thorns through the lethal foliage of the great upas-tree." (Memory, 1919). Just over a decade later another American, father of sword and sorcery Robert E. Howard proclaimed, "When the world was young and men were weak, and the fiends of the night walked free, I strove with Set by fire and steel and the juice of the upas-tree," in The Phoenix on the Sword (1932).
As recently as 1964 master of humour P. G. Wodehouse, ten years before his death on Valentine's Day in 1974, in Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves (1964) had Bertie Wooster ask, "What's the tree I read about somewhere that does you in if you sit under it?" "The upas tree, Sir."
"She's a female upas tree. It's not safe to come near her."
Alas, while James Bond encountered the appalling Japanese suicide garden during one of his perambulations and more recently, we have been entertained by Harry Potter's exploits at Hogwarts, such entertaining dendrology has been banished from literature and motion picture. What awaits the unwary traveller in today's tropical rainforests walks on two legs with larcenous intent.
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
