Calle del Acónito

The aconite gives violet-blue flowers shaped like a hood or helmet, growing among rocks in the high mountains of Europe. That beauty hides one of the most potent plant poisons known: aconitine, able to stop a heart in tiny doses and to seep in even through the skin. Hence its other name, wolfsbane, because baits were made from its root to kill vermin. Calle del Acónito belongs to the cluster of Valdeacederas streets named after a plant or flower —⁠Genciana, Miosotis and others nearby⁠—⁠, a custom that filled Madrid’s street names with botany when so many duplicated streets had to be renamed after the outlying villages were absorbed in the mid-twentieth century. No record survives of why this flower was chosen. The Greeks consecrated the aconite to Hecate, goddess of magic and the underworld, and one legend told that it had sprung from the drool of Cerberus when Heracles dragged the three-headed dog out of Hades.