Lolium temulentum, commonly known as darnel, poison darnel, darnel ryegrass or cockle, is an annual flowering plant in the grass family Poaceae. The plant stem can grow up to one meter tall, with inflorescence in the ears and purple grain. It has a cosmopolitan distribution.
Growth
Darnel usually grows in the same production zones as wheat and was a serious weed of cultivation, a Vavilovian mimic of wheat, until modern sorting machinery enabled darnel seeds to be separated efficiently from seed wheat. The similarity between these two plants is so great that in some regions, darnel is called "false wheat."Craig S. Keener, The Gospel of Matthew: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009 p.387 It bears a close resemblance to wheat until the ear appears. The spikes of L. temulentum are more slender than those of wheat. The spikelets are oriented edgeways to the rachis and have only a single glume, while those of wheat are oriented with the flat side to the rachis and have two glumes. Wheat will appear brown when ripe, whereas darnel is black.Heinrich W.Guggenheimer, The Jerusalem Talmud,Vol. 1, Part 3, Walter de Gruyter, 2000 p.5
Darnel can be infected by an endophytic fungus of the genus Neotyphodium and the endophyte-produced, insecticidal loline alkaloids were first isolated from this plant.
The French word for darnel is ivraie (from Latin ebriacus, intoxicated), which expresses the drunken nausea from eating the infected plant, which can be fatal. The French name echoes the scientific name, Latin temulentus "drunk."
Literary references
Aristotle mentions darnel in his On Sleep amongst a short list of substances which induce sleep. The ancient Greek botanist Theophrastus stated in his De causis plantarum (8:7 §1) that wheat can transform (metaballein) into darnel (aira), since fields sown to wheat are often darnel when reaped. Horace's Satire 2.6 refers to “vetch” as the grain eaten by the country mouse while he serves his guest fancier, but that grain is probably not darnel, which is generally toxic to animals and birds as well as humans. Darnel is one of the many ingredients in mithridate, which Mithridates, the king of ancient Pontus, is supposed to have used every day to render him immune to poisoning. Darnel was evidently the toxic weed in the Parable of the Tares in the Gospel of Matthew in the King James Version of the Bible, which translated the Aramaic word zizania as tares:
Dionysios, a second-century bishop of Corinth, uses darnel (zizania) as a metaphor for the corruptions of his letters caused by "the devil's apostles."Eusebius of Caesarea, Ecclesiastical History 4.23.12. Darnel is mentioned in the Mishnah in Kilayim (1:1) as זונין (), similar to the Arabic زؤان ().Artscroll Kilayim, June 2012 The anonymous classic Greek work Geoponika contains multiple references to darnel (zizonia).See the English translation by Thomas Owen published in 1806 (posted at https://archive.org/details/Geoponica02/page/n2/mode/1up) and the Greek-English Lexicon of Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott (published in 1946 and posted at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0057:entry=ziza/nion). In ordering the St. Brice's Day massacre of all the Danes in England, Æthelred the Unready observed that "all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination." Darnel is also mentioned as a weed in Shakespeare's King Lear. The 1912 Beatrix Potter book The Tale of Mr. Tod describes a character digging a deep hole for "dog darnel". See also Bromus tectorum
References
External links "Wheat’s Evil Twin Has Been Intoxicating Humans For Centuries", Atlas Obscura, March 22, 2016