Found a cool plant

08-27-2025

I was at a local park with my kids yesterday and I found this plant with big star-shaped leaves and weird squishy spiky seeds just randomly growing in a crack on the concrete and thought I'd use a plant-identifier app to learn more about it. My app identified it as ricinus communis A.K.A. castor oil plant [en español: ricino, castor, higuerilla]. The app itself doesn't give a lot of information but it did hint that it has uses in food, industry and more, and the fact that it has a ton of common names was also interesting —for most plants or animals, you can get a pretty good idea of how important it is for humans from how many names it has.

Once I was back home I wanted to read more about it and looked it up on Wikipedia and was surprised to read about all the uses and even history of this plant —mostly the seeds—; it's main product is castor oil, which has uses in medicine and industry and seems to date back to Ancient Egypt and India. But it can also produce ricin which is a fairly powerful poison, in fact, one of the most most potent plant-based poisons, wich leaves little to no trace in the body... wait, how the hell does he know that? Because of Breaking Bad of course. It was used by the Mussolini regime in Italy and the Franco regime in Spain to torture dissidents, and was, allegedly, used by the KGB to assasinate Bulgarian defector Georgi Markov in London in 1978: a man shot a tiny pellet filled with ricin from a modified umbrella-gun at Markov's thigh while he was waiting at the bus stop —very spy-movie style— and he died 4 days later. But the oil has beneficial uses in industry, from lubrication to varnishing and is used in many traditional medicines, mostly as a laxative. The extract is used as pesticide. The leaves are also used to dye textiles and feed silkworms, and the seeds are used to make jewelry.

Pretty cool plant indeed. Which makes it a little surprising to find just casually growing in a public park in my sketchy neighborhood in [REDACTED] City.

PS: I think I finally got the RSS feed to work now, feel free to add it to your favorite reader!