Mandragora officinarum Seeds | Mandrake

Mandrake (Mandragora officinarum) seed — Mandrake (*Mandragora officinarum*): Solanaceae, native to The central and eastern Mediterranean: southern Italy and Sicily, the Balkan peninsula and Greece, Turkey, the Levant and North Africa, on stony hillsides and in winter-wet scrub.

LATIN NAME: Mandragora officinarum

COMMON NAME: Mandrake

Plant Profile

Every part carries tropane alkaloids, and the root carries most: hyoscyamine, its racemised form atropine, and scopolamine, also called hyoscine. These are the compounds behind the sleep of the old surgical recipes and behind the poisonings in the same records. The margin between a dose that dulls pain and one that stops breathing is narrow, and no grower can guess a root’s alkaloid load from its size.

The route to those alkaloids was worked out in the sister genera of the family, in deadly nightshade and in henbane. It begins with putrescine, which putrescine N-methyltransferase turns into N-methylputrescine; oxidation and cyclisation give tropinone, and tropinone reductase sets the stereochemistry that leads either to tropine, the alcohol half of the esters, or to pseudotropine and the calystegines. A final hydroxylase, hyoscyamine 6-beta-hydroxylase, converts hyoscyamine into scopolamine.

The forked root was read as a signature: because it resembled a body, it was held to act on the whole body, and mandrake became the plant of love charms and sympathetic magic as much as of physic. The historian Josephus described a plant called baaras that had to be drawn up by a dog because touching it was fatal, and later writers identified that plant with mandrake, keeping the dog in the story.

After the berry ripens the rosette yellows and the plant goes down, and the pot should stay almost dry until the crown stirs again in late summer. Water by the weight of the pot rather than by a calendar; a mandrake that stands wet through its rest rots at the crown. Repot only when the root has filled the container, setting the crown at its original level.

Science & Biotechnology

Mandrake is slow, long-lived and difficult to divide, so laboratory work on its alkaloids leans on in-vitro root culture, the standard route for the tropane genera. Roots can be kept axenic, and hairy-root lines induced with Agrobacterium rhizogenes go on multiplying without added plant hormones because the transferred bacterial genes drive division. Micropropagation from explants gives clonal plants of a species whose seedlings vary widely in vigour.

Uses & Benefits

A mandrake root is a storage organ and it behaves like one. It thickens slowly over the years, and in a mature plant it divides low down into two or three long arms, each heavy with stored food. Nothing about that fork is a fixed character of the species, which is why the old accounts describe so many shapes, and why a grower is always surprised by what the ground has made.

There is no aerial stem. The leaves rise in a flat rosette from the crown, ovate to lance-shaped and heavily veined, lying so close to the soil that the plant reads as a patch of dark crumpled foliage. The flowers open low in the middle of that rosette in late winter, five-lobed bells in a dull violet-green, and the round yellow berry that follows is the only bright object on the plant.

The split begins with damage. A seedling makes one fleshy taproot, and if its growing tip meets a stone or dries out, two lateral roots thicken and take over the storage work. Storage roots also shorten as they mature and pull the crown down until it sits flush with the ground, the habit of many geophytes of winter-wet country, so the fork is seen only when the whole plant is lifted.

Growing from Seed

The soporific sponge is the best recorded surgical use. A sponge was soaked in a decoction of mandrake root with henbane, hemlock and opium poppy, then dried in the shade and moistened again with hot water to be held under the patient’s nose before the knife came out. The recipe circulated in the Latin medical compendia of medieval Europe and shows that surgical pain had been named long before it was answered.

Sow into a deep container, because the taproot cannot be moved later without risk. Two parts loam-based compost, one part leaf mould and two parts coarse grit suits it; press the seed onto the surface and cover it with grit to about its own depth. Keep the pot cool and evenly damp through winter, and prick the seedlings into individual pots at the three or four true-leaf stage.

Our Take

I keep my mandrakes in tall terracotta pots against a south wall, where the compost dries fast enough to please them, and I treat the berries as the poisonous fruit they are. If your taste runs to the rest of the tropane tribe, henbane and the thorn apple belong in the same collection, and the angel’s trumpet gives you the fragrance without the folklore.

Herb Seeds