Re: Datura or Brugmansia--Yes, very poisonous

Anthony Lyman-Dixon wrote:
> Hullo Moira, Catherine and all
>
> We have grown Datura stramonium and many other toxic plants here for
> years and found that invariably, it is the adults that are a problem
> rather than their children.....
Hi Anthony
You paint avery depressing picture of your clients. I wonder how much of
the problem is that so many people are now living such an artificial life with almost no contact with real wild nature. In the days when most
people had lots of contact with the countryside I think there was plenty
of good sense about plants and what could safely be done with them.

I am a bit surprised though by the children who won't have anything to
do with salad greens, I know there is the occasional food faddist among
them (one of my granddaughters used to be a prime example) but if my own family is anything to go by, it was not raw but cooked veges they would have nothing to do with. I even had one son who would eat raw frozen peas but refuse them after they had been heated!

As to putting things in their mouths, our oldest granddaughter would have pleased you when she was a baby. It was almost impossible to persuade her to put _anything_ in her mouth beyond a bottle teat and we had the greatest difficulty trying to make her pick up and nibble even a rusk. She was, though, a joy to feed later as she would let you spoon food into her mouth tidily and made no move to "help". (That is all in fact ancient history as she is now 25!).

One of the things which in my experience will drive children to eat raw
plants is a deficiency in their diet of vit C and maybe minerals as
well. I have two tales about this one; the first relates to my Yorkshire mother's memories of how as kids she and her friends would feast in spring on the young opening buds of hawthorn and blackthorn in the hedgerows. They called them "bread and cheese". The other is actually from my own experence. Early in WW2 when I was school child in Kenya our school was evacuated from Nairobi to the commandeered estate of an interned German count way out in the wopwops. It had been unoccupied for best part of a year and the extensive veg garden has not been replanted. As result the school, getting all its supplies in by train from more than 100 miles away, had at first the greatest difficult providing us with fresh produce. This was a time long before the idea of giving supplements was common and nothing in this line was done for us, so we definitely began to show the first signs of deficiency with lots of boils and styes and every small cut or scratch turning septic. Unfortunately the very efficient nurse we previously had was also a German and off she had to go to the camp leaving us to the ministrations of the staff and the odd mother who came to help out, none of whom had the professional grasp of what was happening. HOWEVER (and this is the point of my tale) we kids took to roaming the extensive grounds looking for what we might devour,and apart from peaches (mostly underripe and pretty horrible) we took to the leaves of certain plants (I remember in particular nasturtiums and ivy geraniums) which we found quite irresistable) so that eventually many were picked bare.

The end of the tale was that after a while the veg gardens were
ressurected and supplies from a distance established and then the
assault on the garden simply stopped. There was one unfortuate corollory
though, having got through our defences the bugs in our systems were
hard to dislodge. I continued myself to be troubled by boils and styes
for the next four or five years even on a good diet.

>
> So education good, ignorance generally OK, half an education, a
> recipe for disaster. This with the caveat that the educators should
> be selected not merely for their botanical knowledge but also their
> common sense. I attended a conference at Kew several years ago,
> called as the result of a panic over vain people consuming
> Aristolochia in an attempt to lose weight and losing their kidney
> function instead. Here a Dutch academic in all seriousness, advocated
> the destruction of all wild populations of plants potentially harmful
> to humans. Now, more moronic, ill-considered and totally blinkered
> suggestions might have escaped the cloud cuckoo land that passes for
> Dutch academia, but I have yet to hear of any. Apart from losing most
> of the world's medicinal herbs at a stroke, what would become of the
> caterpillars that rely on these plants and what would be the
> consequences further up the food chain for instance? The use of Agent
> Orange in Vietnam should have been enough to teach the world a
> lesson. Obviously one could spend all day enlarging on the
> theoretical consequences of such an action .

This was undoubtedly one of the ivory tower brigade who look on an
academic career as a convenient bolt-hole from real life. They can give a bad name to the genuine scientists I fear and sometimes do real harm where they are mistakenly taken notice of..

Of course it is not only idiocy of this sort which can menace the environment, greed is another potent killer of nature as Monsanto and friends are going out of their way to prove.

> Incidentally I had a girl friend who used to take the odd Datura seed
> in gin for migraine and toothach..

Another horror story!

> Anyway I have
> got a large coffee tin of the things for if and when the cancer comes
> back, I would rather slip away surrounded by my own toxic plants than
> the viruses and toxic dirt of a modern British hospital.

I sincerely hope it never comes to that for you Anthony and that you are able to instead die peacefully at some ripe old age. I gather cancer recurrence is by no means inevitable.

Meanwhile
> restaurateurs have been warned not to put holly with berries on their
> Christmas puddings in case some total prat eats them and sues. So
> happy Christmas everybody.

I was wondering why I had never seen real holly on a plum pudding but then realized I have lived all but a very few years of my life in the southern hemisphere where we don't have holly berries at Christmas time!

Happy Christmas (or whatever) to everybody anyway, with or without holly!
(we will expect here to have our usual great show of Pohutukawa (Metrosideros) instead. The trees are full of buds almost ready to open.)

Moira
--
Tony & Moira Ryan,
Wainuiomata, North Island, NZ. Pictures of our garden at:-
http://mywebpages.comcast.net/cherie1/Garden/TonyandMoira/index.htm

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