hymlic

Old English hymlic (or hemlic) has no clear etymology. It may relate to healm ('straw, stalk') or to a lost Germanic root. The word originally referred to poison hemlock (Conium maculatum), a plant in the carrot family whose every part is toxic. English later applied the same name to hemlock trees (Tsuga), an unrelated conifer — creating a permanent confusion between a poisonous herb and a harmless evergreen.

Poison hemlock killed Socrates. In 399 BCE, an Athenian jury convicted him of impiety and corrupting youth. He drank a preparation of konion (κώνειον), the Greek name for the plant. Plato's Phaedo describes the death: numbness starting in the feet, rising to the heart. Modern toxicologists debate the account — pure coniine poisoning causes respiratory failure, not the peaceful numbness Plato describes.

The hemlock tree got its name by accident. European settlers in North America noticed that the crushed needles of Tsuga canadensis smelled like poison hemlock leaves. They called the tree 'hemlock' despite its being a conifer, non-toxic, and useful for lumber and tanning. The name stuck. Hemlock forests across New England bear the name of a Mediterranean poison.

Hemlock timber built barns, bridges, and railroad ties across 19th-century America. The bark was the primary source of tannin for the leather industry until the 1920s. Today, eastern hemlocks face annihilation from the hemlock woolly adelgid, an invasive insect from Asia that has killed millions of trees since the 1980s. The tree named after a poison is being killed by a pest.