I tried to think of a time when I’d done something like that, either purposely or by accident, but she was right. I’d never brought back a plant from its dusty, decayed remains. Avoiding her worried gaze, I gently untangled the tendrils from my leg, pushed the pot back against the wall, and turned my attention to the massive book.

“Plants are classified in Latin,” I said. “So I recognize that part. I think the other word is—” I took out my phone and Googled “hortus.” I wanted to be sure. “ ‘Hortus’ means ‘garden.’ It’s ‘poison garden.’ ”

We huddled around the book as Mo pulled open the front cover. The spine cracked like a set of aching knuckles. The first page was a semitransparent piece of paper. Through it, I could make out the outline of a plant. Mo gently uncovered the picture underneath. The details were sharp, the colors vivid, like a photograph. The only clues that it was hand-drawn were the hints of pencil where the artist had painted over their sketch.

“It’s beautiful,” Mom said.

I didn’t need to read the Latin inscription to know what it was. The white parasol-shaped blooms gave it away. It was the same plant I’d grown in Prospect Park. The very same plant that should have killed me. Cicuta douglasii, the water hemlock. I took a deep breath, pushing away the memories of what had happened in my room with the plant—or more importantly what hadn’t happened.

Mo flipped through the pages, revealing more beautifully detailed drawings of every poisonous plant I knew of and some I didn’t. I recognized the velvety pink petals of oleander and the white orb with its blackened pupil of the Doll’s Eye, both capable of stopping a heart in less time than the hemlock. But there was a vine with tendrils black as the night sky, dotted with indigo leaves and hundreds and hundreds of bloodred thorns that I’d never seen before. The Latin classification was listed as Vitis spicula, but the common name was Devil’s Pet.

“Don’t like that,” Mo said quietly, shaking her head. “No, ma’am. Let’s go on ahead and flip that page.” She turned the page so hard the pedestal rocked to the side.

There were brackets alongside the drawings labeling the parts in intricate detail. There were measurements and deconstructed drawings of the plants from their surfaces to their insides. It was all diagrammed, from the minuscule trichomes—little coverings of hairlike structures some plants had—to the points of every leaf, every vein, every node.

At the bottom of each page, sectioned off by a thick black line, were detailed instructions for the care and cultivation of the plants, printed in perfect penmanship. It listed how much sun, shade, and water each plant needed, what kind of soil, and when to harvest each one.