I never knew that hemlock grew alongside English fields,

Of purple hue, it poisons you, and life to death it yields.

‘He ran with them to where, amidst the purple-streaked stems of hemlock, the old man was standing on the shillets.’

Source: Henry Williamson, Tarka the Otter: His joyful water-life and death in the two rivers, illus. C.F. Tunnicliffe (Harmondsworth: Puffin Books, 1976 (1927)), p. 40