Poisonous plants
dblum | April 28, 2010One evening, in the early summer of 2008, a Colorado sheriff's deputy named Jonathan Allen came home to find that his wife had made him a "special" dinner. Waiting on the table was his favorite spicy spaghetti dish and a big leafy bowl of salad.
As he told investigators later, the salad was surprisingly bitter. But his wife told him it was a "spring mix" and he assumed it contained another of those trendy herbs that people use to liven up their greens. At least, he thought that way until he ended up in the hospital suffering from severe stomach cramps and a wildly speeding heart.
After his…
dblum | March 17, 2010I find it ironic - okay, I find it slightly hilarious - that the house plant which results in the most calls to poison control centers is called the Peace Lily.
Next on the list is Pokeweed - which people have a bad habit of mistaking for other edible wild plants - followed by two holiday favorites, poinsettias and holly plants.
As the Peace Lily is popular at Easter, one could conclude that holiday plants are particularly dangerous. But there's actually a more interesting - if less amusing - background to such risks.
Most of the calls, of course, aren't funny at all. They concern curious…
dblum | March 13, 2010When I was eight years old, my sister and I discovered that a small tree in our Louisiana backyard was dropping some thickly shelled nuts into the grass. We loved eating fallen nuts; an enormous pecan tree carpeted the front yard with them every summer. But these were different - rounder and fatter.
Curious, we smashed a few on a brick, opening up some fleshy pale kernels inside. "Almonds!" I proposed hopefully. We sat down under the tree and prepared a feast. I don't fully remember what they tasted like. Slightly bitter, a little like a fresh leaf, a blade of grass. We were always tasting…
dblum | February 12, 2010The poison, according to Greek mythology, could be traced to the gates of hell. It dripped from the jaws of Cerberus, the hulking three-headed dog that guarded the entrance to the underworld.
For centuries, it's carried the taint of dark magic. The ancient Greeks called it the Queen of Poisons, the deadliest of all. People called it wolfsbane, dogsbane, even - rather horrifyingly - wifesbane. The poison's reputation has intrigued writers over the years. Oscar Wilde used it in his story of a determined murderer, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime. It was used by a character in James Joyce's…
dblum | February 5, 2010So one summer evening in 2008, a Maryland family sits down to a dinner of home-made beef stew flavored with mint from the backyard and, oh yeah, some other plant growing in the leafy borders by the fence. It looks like this:An hour after dinner, another relative shows up to find the members of the dinner party dazed and incoherent, some giggling uncontrollably, some staggering with hallucinations. Then they start to throw up. The dismayed relative calls 911; by the time all six of the stew-eaters arrive at the emergency room, two are unconscious. All are struggling for breath, their heart-…