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“Please don’t eat the daffodils” the next time you are out in the flower garden. Or the jonquils, or the azaleas, or the rhododendrons.
They can be mouthfuls of death.
With spring bustin’ out all over, the warnings—in the opinion of botanists—are timely and in no way as silly as they may sound, according to the National Geographic Society.
‘After a long winter these spring flowers look just about good enough to eat,” one naturalist said. “And anyway, for many it’s just sort of an automatic thing to do when you’re strolling around admiring Mother Nature’s handiwork. You know, you snap off a blade of grass or whatever and absentmindedly stick it in your mouth.” "
It could also be a dangerous thing to do. Many of the popular flowers, ornamental shrubs, and colorful weeds are loaded with poison, even enough tokillagrazing horse, as farmers occasionally find.
All parts of the plants—seeds, berries, roots, stalks, flowers— may contain poisons that do their work on heart, nerves, brain, blood, muscles, and in breathing. They have done in victims throughout history, by accident and by murder in real-life, fiction, and folklore. However, these often lethal chemicals also are being tested for curative properties. Many familiar plants long have been used as medicines. And they also have been valued as poisons, love potions, frecklefaders, stimulants, hair-restorers, cathartics, wart-shrinkers, and the like. Some eye-catching plants, like
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