MANDRAKE

The field of poison is made so by the crop of mandrakes simultaneously screaming underground. Even planting a solitary mandrake ‘neath the blackwood will not produce the greatest desired effect. No, the mandrake must grow in the moon’s rays. And dwell near its cursing cousin, the deadly nightshade. Trail the walk of the natterjack toad, for many nights it will make you follow then you unearth the young mandrakes home as shown. The teething specimen you may eat as it screams. If assorted mouthfulls of worms and mud impair your mad meal, you may do better and mummify the mandrake harnessing screams in the strength and frequency you desire. A mandrake attaining great age is usually a mute, certainly so in captivity. If ungagged as its life expires the mandrake issues forth a most horrendous and macabre death rattle. Like a combined group of humans, similarly emitting the gurgling-screaming-crying and other more chilling sounds from the throat at the point of death is also how the expiring ancient mandrake sounds, only longer and louder in volume.
Or you might have your stomach cut open, mandrake inserted, halitosis ensues as do words which offend and an occasional play of flame across your lips, a reminder of the origins of the mandragon.
They fall off the womandrake, tiny but fully formed males and females, purposeful and self contained like toadlets. These are the baby mandrakes following ways lit by night’s white beams. For some the path is interrupted. Intercepted at dusk by occasional juvenile individual birds, called the Goatsucker or more often the Nightjar. Once swallowed the mandrake will cause the bird, at first, great sadness, then mad flights, swooping, crashing, dying. Landing up in a vicinity advantageous to the mandrake who exploit’s the dead bird as a kind of compost. This process does cause some apparent harm, afflicting the body of the mandrake but this acts only as a kind of early drastic pruning and if the mandrake survives and it almost always does, it becomes far more hardy, growing quickly but also in a more sturdy way.