VII: Doronicum
Why do we need a flower that kill leopards?
Good morning. Today is septidi, the 17th of Ventôse, Year CCXXXI. We celebrate le doronic, a member of the sunflower family that gets started the earliest.
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This is not a shy flower, arriving in early spring with a riotous burst of yellow color. That's probably why it got so much notice that people realized animals wouldn't eat it. To this day, its mildly poisonous sap makes it an effective deer and rabbit repellant, but in its native range of the eastern Mediterranean countries, this repelling power was considered so strong that its nectar tipped arrows used for leopard hunting, thus the traditional name. The name is also applied to acontium, a stalk-like purple flower that grows in the mountainous regions of Greece and is far more poisonous – and thus likely more effective for taking care of leopard problems.
Wait, why were ancient Greeks and Turks so worried about leopards? This may seem odd when the habitat of the big cat is so firmly sub-Saharan Africa or deep into the Indian subcontinent, which were both regions known to the ancient Mediterranean world but not exactly in close contact.
The simple answer is that leopards used to be common in modern-day Türkiye and the Nile River delta of Egypt, and were hunted out of the areas because of their propensity to eat livestock.
