GET GROWING!
WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE POISON?
Monkshood has rich, velvety blooms, but is a poisonous plant. Image credit: LADYBUG.
By LADYBUG
This time of year, when the nurseries are full of colourful and fragrant plants that lure us with the promise of seasons of colour, keep in mind that many plants, many of them garden staples, are poisonous and can be harmful to children or pets.
Remember all the poisons in Agatha Christie’s books? Many of them were derived from garden plants.
Poisonous plants that I have invited into my garden include monkshood and foxglove. Both have spectacular blooms, but both are poisonous.
My first monkshood was a gift from my gardening buddy Linda. I’d seen it in her garden and instantly fallen in love with the gorgeous blooms. She said it was a generous seeder and promised me a seedling.
That little seedling grew into a sturdy plant that was a delight to behold in late summer each year. And true to form it also gave me many seedlings that I moved to other parts of my garden and then moved a few to our next home.
As a novice gardener, I had no idea that it was a poisonous plant. That information I gleaned from an article in the now defunct Canadian Gardening magazine.
Google monkshood and you will learn its other evocative names. Among them, wolfsbane, leopard’s bane and devil’s helmet. Also that ingestion “can lead to a range of symptoms, including life-threatening refractory cardiac arrhythmias”. Yikes.
I picked up a packet of seeds of foxglove, seduced by the exotic colours. The first year was disappointing. The plants grew, but didn’t reward me with blooms. And thus I learnt that these are biennials and bloom every other year. However, there’s a workaround that – just plant some the following year, and then each batch will bloom in alternate years, ensuring continuous bloom!
While foxgloves have medicinal uses, they are also toxic to humans and animals, and consumption can even lead to death. The names it is known by – dead man’s bells and witch’s gloves – are indicative of the “deadly physiological and chemically related cardiac and steroidal glyco-sides” it contains. The toxins can be absorbed via the skin or ingestion.
We didn’t have pets and our children were old enough to understand instructions to stay away from certain plants, but it got me thinking. How many other plants in our gardens were toxic or poisonous?
That most delicate of plants, lily of the valley, for one. I was astonished to read that “all parts of the lily of the valley plant, including the flowers, leaves, and berries, are poisonous and can cause serious health problems if ingested, including cardiac issues. Ingesting any part of the plant can lead to symptoms like vomiting, diarrhoea, irregular heartbeat, and in severe cases, even death.”
Among tropical plants that I grow in pots and haul out each spring and haul back inside each fall are also ones that are poisonous. Dhatura and oleander, in particular. I knew about dhatura, from various stories and old wive’s tales in India. “All species of this plant are extremely poisonous and psychoactive, especially their seeds and flowers, which can cause respiratory depression, arrhythmias, fever, delirium, hallucinations, anticholinergic toxidrome, psychosis, and death if taken internally.”
Oleander is that ubiquitous plant that flourishes on medians on highways across India and many parts of Europe, braving dust and fumes and unfavourable conditions that lesser plant would wilt under. But it, too, is poisonous. “Inhaling smoke from burning oleander, consuming water that the flowers were placed in, or using oleander branches to roast marshmallows... may cause nausea, abdominal pain, vomiting, cardiac dysrhythmias.”
Okay, so not many of us are about to roast marshmallows on oleander branches, but it does give one pause to think.
My search also revealed a startling truth:
Though sacred in some cultures, tobacco (nicotiana tabucum) is deemed the most deadly plant on the planet. Human abuse of the plant has managed to enslave humankind into farming it across nearly 10 million acres around the world, despite it killing over 8 million people every year – 1.3 million of whom die from second-hand smoke.