A Botanic Gardens exhibition looks at how plants are used by people around the world, writes Claire O'Connell.
Have you ever wondered what a cannibal uses to eat dinner? Then it's time to visit the National Botanic Gardens, where a free, public exhibition highlights how plants are used around the world.
The displays feature artifacts from the national herbarium collection and include some unusual and ominous implements, such as a wooden fork designed for eating humans.
"For this exhibition we have picked out some of the most interesting and quirky things from the collection," says Dr Peter Wyse Jackson, director of the gardens.
"The idea is to show the diversity of ways that plants have been used for multitudes of purposes."
Some of those purposes have been less than savoury, and include a four-pronged wooden fork for eating "longpig" or human flesh. "It is a splendid implement and it's very specific in the shape of it," says Dr Wyse Jackson of the fork, which his colleague, Dr Matthew Jebb picked up in the Fijian Islands.
Equally threatening is the four-foot long rattan palm blowpipe and darts that Dr Wyse Jackson brought home from Sarawak in Malaysia. "It's lethal, you could take a monkey out of a tree at 50 yards with that," he says.
Less alarming are the "big beans" or bilobed coco de mer fruits, which grow in the Seychelles and can be used to make cosmetics, explains Dr Wyse Jackson. "Today the coco de mer fruits belong to the government because they are rare," he says. "They are also sold to tourists for a few hundred dollars and the money raised goes towards the Seychelles Foundation which supports conservation. It's a really good way of making use of the special resource."
Fashion items also feature heavily in the exhibition, with a panama hat from palm, a bag made from pineapple fibres, slippers of rice straw and a swatch of tapa cloth, which is the bark of the paper mulberry and was made famous by the Queen of Tonga, he explains.
"She wore a dress made from tapa to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth," he recounts. "She was in an open carriage and got soaked, so when she got back she just took off her tapa cloth dress, shook it out and went to the ball."
There are plenty of Irish connections too, with surgical dressings made from the bog-moss Sphagnum, a willow-bark peeler from Connemara and a specimen of the African baobab fruit collected in the Congo by Irish patriot Roger Casement.
Meanwhile, more recreational plants crop up in the form of cannabis, tobacco, teas and coffees alongside intoxicating kava and an Argentinian gourd for brewing "mate" from the holly-like Yerba plant.
"There are many hidden treasures in the collection that one wouldn't necessarily expect," says Dr Wyse Jackson, adding that many of the artifacts are on public display for the first time.
The plan is to give the collection a more visible abode at the gardens, he adds. "We have an old museum building, which is used as a machine shed, but we hope to restore that and put it in the garden as a permanent museum for some of these collections. We also really want to add to it, so if people have plant-based artifacts, they can donate them to become part of the long-term collection."
• Baobabs and Big Beans - an exploration of plants for peopleruns until August 19th the visitor centre in the National Botanic Gardens, Glasnevin, Dublin. Admission free.