GLAD' TIDINGS

The Toronto Sick Kids' publication Information for Families-Plant Safety says that Gladiola are 'known to be poisonous to humans'. I don't know why.

   I do know that it should be Gladiolus. It could just be that the list maker has been eating the Alihotsy leaves and confused Gladioli with the Bouncing Bulb or the Bubotuber (http://hp-lexicon.org/magic/herbology.html)                     See J.K.Rowling The Harry Potter Lexicon : Magical and Mundane Plants
 She is a self-proclaimed plant hater.

WITHERING HEIGHTS

William Withering trained as a physician at the University of Edinburgh, probably the most important medical school in the world when he got his M.D. in 1776. As a well-tutored man he studied and published scientific papers on minerology and chemistry and was a first class botanist.   His intellectual life was exercised and enriched by  membership in the Lunar Society of Birmingham where he would wine and dine and exchange views on current science with the likes of Joseph Priestley who first (according to the British) isolated oxygen. Other famous members of the club included James Watt, improving and manufacturing the steam engine, Josiah Wedgwood who made porcelain and Erasmus Darwin, physician and grandfather to Charles.
   In 1775 Withering's opinion was sought regarding a herbal mixture that was being used by 'an old woman in Shropshire' to successfully treat 'dropsy' or congestive heart failure. Her mixture contained over twenty ingredients; but, said the doctor, "It was not difficult for me to perceive that the active herb could be no other than the Foxglove". For the next ten years until he published "An Account of the Foxglove" in 1786, he set about quite scientifically to discover how best to use the 'beautiful green powder'. He admitted that at first he was using a too strong dosage that produced a violent vomiting. He needed to find the amount that would slow the pulse rate and produce a stronger pumping action from the failing heart with less of the emetic side effect.
   So the eminent doctor had taken a folk medicine and gave us our first modern 'wonder drug'.

     Purple Foxglove, Digitalis purpurea is a much admired wayside wild flower that was welcomed into the English "cottage garden'. I would love to see it invade Ontario as it is one of very few shade tolerant plants that is tall growing. Unfortunately this biennial's first year foliage rosette rarely overwinters. (It does very well in British Columbia.) Remembering the shabby treatment accorded the beautiful Purple Loosestrife, perhaps we don't deserve it.
   Children and Foxglove have gotten along wonderfully well for generations before Withering and in the two hundred years since his great achievement. Now we have the overly anxious spoiling this idyll. We are told that children must not drink rainwater out of the flowers for fear of poisoning. Why do people say such things ? A Foxglove flower would make a better lampshade than a tumbler. They hang down. They don't collect water. Even if a bloom is detached and used as a drinking glass, the drug dose would be safely homeopathic.
   It is perfectly obvious that despite Foxglove being so medicinally potent, that in fact, children are not poisoned. The leaves of Digitalis are bitter. If a child chewed a leaf it would be spat out. In the highly unlikely case where a leaf is actually swallowed, it would immediately be ejected by vomiting.
   I neither want to make light of foxgloves toxicity nor have people be fearful of a desirable flower; I wish only to make the point that in real life children are not harmed. It does not happen.
  

GIANT HOGWASH

GIANT HOGWEED
     Since I have not personally seen the Giant Hogweed appearing along our streams and other wet spots and have not been blistered by molesting it, I have to rely on the reports of others. As a nurseryman, I have grown, displayed and sold (until there were complaints) both the Giant Hogweed, Heracleum mantegazzanianum and the native Cow Parsnip, Heracleum lanatum. I should be able to identify them if I found them growing wild.
   My concern is, that based on written descriptions and even photographs, the very common and quite harmless Angelica is being mistaken for the Hogweed.This is not not the European plant used in liqueurs and as a candied confectionary but Angelica atropurpurea with reddish-white flowerheads, not pure white like Hogweed.
Should you ever see Giant Hogweed in flower it would be impossible to make such an error. The flowerheads are huge; often likened to a cartwheel, up to 30 inches (50cm) wide. A specimen 12 to 16 feet tall, with many flowerheads and impressive foliage is a sight to behold. That is the time to photograph it, perhaps with your toddler underneath to show its' scale, as this will be your one and only chance. Once the Giant Hogweed flowers and sets seed it dies. It is monocarpic.
   The smaller but still grand Cow Parsnip is biennial, flowering then dying in its' second year. We need the word 'monocarpic' as biennial won't do. Giant Hogweed flowers when it is 6 years old ; then it's gone.
   Angelica, Anise, Carrot, Celery, Dill, Fennel, Lovage, Parsley and Parsnip are all in the same family. Not everybody gets blisters from this plant group although a few unfortunates are particularly sensitive. Some find ordinary celery almost deadly as it could lead to anaphylactic shock. So, hold the Bloody Mary garnish. And no Celery Salt either.
   A gardener once showed me her upper arm and shoulder that had been blistered and even now some weeks later her skin still had dark pigmented splotches where she had wiped her palm after handling a plant. The skin on our palm seems to be made of tougher stuff and wiping your hand on your arm is a natural enough gesture. Supposing that it was caused by a Heracleum I showed her our two varieties but she did not recognize them. At my request she came back with a sample of her plant wrapped in plastic. I immediately recognised by the size of the stalks that were ribbed like celery that it was Parsnip, Pastinaca sativa.
   Parsnip  is a yellow-flowered biennial grown as an annual for its' sweet white carrot-like tuber that is harvested after the first frost. It was very much valued as a winter vegetable and our earliest settlers would certainly have brought it with them from Europe. I never heard tell of any blistering effect. Perhaps our grandparents were made of tougher stuff.




 

HIVES OF ACTIVITY

     Over the years I have seen a number of people who liked the idea of working with plants but were forced to find a different career. There were just too many plants that gave them skin rashes. Most often the source could be found in a handful of usual suspects ; but not always. When the irritant plant could not be identified and then simply avoided, the sufferer would be forced into a life of fluorescent-lit air-conditioned misery.
   In my own experience Foxglove was never a culprit but as it is a chemically active and potent plant that gives us a powereful heart drug I would not be surprised if it had other effects.
With the advent of Facebook and Twitter, victims need no longer suffer in silence. You can tell the world about your problems. You could publish a Blog.
   Since neither myself or any colleage that I am aware of, have suffered negative consequences from any Digitalis species, I am putting up a site for someone who had a bad case of 'hives' from merely cutting back the spent flowering stems.
   In pursuit of the 'deadly' Foxglove I just followed the trail even to a cooking show !  http://whatscookingamerica.net/Information/Foxglove.htm
Please read this and the subsequent correspondence carefully and critically as you are going to be told things like : "This plant is so poisonous that ingesting only .5 gram dried or 2 grams of fresh leaf is enough to kill a person. Another grim fairytale. Did you read this and then kept reading ? or did you stop for a moment and wonder how much is 2 grams ?  Two grams is 0.070547 ounces. A typical paper clip is about a gram.
   Do you believe that a piece of leaf from the flowering stem of a Digitalis equal to the mass or weight of two paper clips is going to kill a child ? I don't either.
   HIVES : A 16th century Scottish word for urticaria ; a rash of round red weals on the skin that itch intensly, often caused by an allergic reaction. Hives occur when histamine is released causing fluids to leak from the smallest blood vessels and create swellings in the skin. Hives are very common and can appear alarmingly quickly; they can be gone by morning or persist for six weeks then go away with or without treatment. The causes are many, perhaps from something you ate; seafood, milk, eggs or from an infinite list; it could result from the sting of a bee or wasp or from the use of histamine- producing products such as Aspirin or Advil. In the majority of cases the cause is never known.
 Apparently for some people, it can be a reaction to the plant tissue and pollen of Foxgloves. When the source is  well-known or unknown the sufferer can only say, "Why me ?" and cope with it as best they can while waiting for it to go away. But if the cause is identified as Digitalis that they 'know' is a deadly poison a cascade of  fears comes flooding over them as they anticipate the very worse outcome. 
 It is unfortunate that we can only learn of our unique susceptibilities the hard way, like the children with nut allergies and while they have our full sympathy and we must do what we can to protect them, garden centres will still be selling Foxgloves and Kraft will still be making peanut butter.

DIGITALIS IN WONDERLAND

   The history of Foxglove and its' use as medicine is an interesting tale well worth the telling; but it is a complicated one. It was how to tell the story and how much I would need to explain that had me stalled for a moment. But there is no help for it: I must tell it all or at least as much as I have learned and understood. In particular, I needed to discover the truth of the many reports of fatal encounters between children and Foxgloves in the garden.
   As the King said, in Alice in Wonderland, "Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop."
  I hope that I will know when I have said enough and you have to begin somewhere; so why not with the fact that Digitalis purpurea is a 'biennial' ? There is as much fuzzy thinking around biennials as there is about Foxgloves.
An annual grows from a seed, then flowers and makes more seed; all in one growing season. A biennial produces only foliage in its' first year and flowers and seeds on the next. Then the plant dies.
   Garden centre operators are happy to leave 'biennial' hazely undefined and let gardeners assume that the plants are perennials with the strange habit of only flowering on alternate years. If you are going to have Foxgloves as permanent tenants you will depend on their successful self-seeding. As an aid to making this quite clear, let me introduce the word 'monocarpic'. This means producing seeds once only; then the plant dies, its' mission accomplished. A famous example is Giant Sea Holly, Eryngiun giganteum. (For more on this story Google 'Miss Willmott's Ghost'.)
Century Plant, Agave americana may not need one hundred years but certainly a few decades before its glorious climax. Many bamboo take more than a century before whole forests make a simultaneous exit.
   Foxgloves have given us a very helpful medicine to treat cases of congestive heart failure. I suggest that you should file that interesting information in some seldom used part of your brain; somewhere that you will not stumble upon too often.
   Garden Centres still sell many species and cultivars of Foxgloves as very desirable flowering plants. Poisoning their customers is hardly a good business plan. Sensible gardeners ignore the doomsayers and the hysterically anxious. To call Foxgloves poisonous plants is another example of the gross misuse of the word. It is not something that should concern you or me. However, I did say that it was a complicated story. Some people are highly allergic to even the touch of Digitalis but that is a separate issue from its' use as a heart medication. It does appear that there will always be someone somewhere allergic to something. I will explore the subject in future postings.