digitalis dessert and flying jade plants

Jun 20, 2008

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Kids stopped at home with Tim today, so I managed an extra 20 minutes in bed but left without my customary cup of tea which turned out to be a mistake as I then didn’t get a drink til lunch time. Cut short my lunch by going to look up foxgloves after one of the parents identified plants in the garden as such, and also mentioned they were poisonous – google and wikipedia quickly confirmed both identification and toxicity, so A and I spent the next two hours digging up the whole bed (including the strawberry plants, sob) on a better safe than sorry approach. It started off just comfortable but got a lot hotter as we were working, and I didn’t notice that my face was hot til we’d finished. I now look rather like a tomato 🙁

I had no idea what foxgloves were – I mean, I knew about them, but didn’t know the rather glorious flowers we had were them. I also had no idea how toxic they are, but given that some verdicts were one leaf is all it takes, we pretty much had to get shot. There’s one in the garden here as well, trying to decide how anti it I’m feeling, it’s in a raised bed above my vegetable patch.

A left school when we were nearly done to go home and shower and change before a parental meeting tonight, and I should have been there til 6 but I cleared off around 5 so that I could shower and change before having an evening. Suspect I’m going to rather pay for this afternoon activity tomorrow, which will be great fun as I’m on first aid training then 🙁 Kids are not impressed by that (they are going to be even less impressed when they discover it runs over two weekends!).

Once I’d got clean and put all clothes in wash we were in the kitchen when Tim spotted a bee and opened the window to let it out, resulting in my rather top heavy and too-big-for-its-pot jade plant taking a header outside. Several leaves and shootlets have broken off, so we’re going to try them as cuttings, and repot the existing plant into a very much bigger pot –the houseplant expert tells me that it could well grow to 2-3 foot in a big enough pot – maybe its trunk will strengthen enough to let that happen because at the moment it’s bending double 🙁

Anyways, we’ve found pots and I know we have compost so I suppose I’d better get on and do that too, no idea where I’m going to put them when they are potted though! And my face is hot. Is it beer time yet?

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Comments

12 responses to “digitalis dessert and flying jade plants”

Merry
20 June 2008
This is going to sound ranty; could you take it as read i’m ranting at the “world gone mad” and not directly at you, given i can see why the “world gone mad” has landed you digging up foxgloves?
I have got a garden full of foxgloves (which are rabbits insist on nibbling on!) and there is absolutely NO WAY i would dig them up. I’ve been meaning to blog them for weeks, i took a photo of them before i went on holiday. I can see that you may be pushed into doing so in a school, but i went to a school with gardens full of them, beautiful, beautiful plants. Kids need to know that some things, even beautiful things, can be poisonous and that they need to be treated with respect. My kids have known since they were tiny and they shriek loudly at rabbits or small people who approach them; they can also recognise Deadly Nightshade because of them.
Obviously one of my children or rabbits will now die of eating one tomorrow… dare i say “better drowned than duffers?” I grew up in a garden full of yew trees but knew not to eat the leaves, and in a village full of berries i didn’t touch unless i absolutely KNEW they were safe. My mum had hemlock growing in her childhood garden at one point; they got a serious telling off for using the stems as blow pens and never did it again. And think of HESFES, the kids got warned about the Giant Hogweed and the ones with sense stayed away, the ones without learned the hard way. I appreciate you can’t (sadly!) apply that in a school, though a school like yours seems like it should be a place you could, but surely it is a sensible approach in your home garden?
I’d hazard a guess that Maria Montessori would say the world had gone mad when beautiful plants had to be dug up because telling kids that some plants were ‘look not touch’ wasn’t enough. How many of them regularly chew on a leaf anyway?
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Jax
20 June 2008
If this was just an elementary or erdkinder, and they were in a bed far removed from edible plants I would probably agree with you, but this is also a nursery for babies and toddlers from 3 months up, and we try to get even the toddling babies out doing gardening on a regular basis. Given that these were in the same bed as the strawberries, *and* right next to the main entrance to one of the classrooms it just wasn’t a good combination. Toddlers *do* chew things, and they could easily have picked a strawberry that had foxglove leaf attached and that would just not work really.
I am rather sad that we’ve lost a whole bed of glorious flowers (and they were glorious, white and purple and very tall) and I do wonder about how much we coddle/pamper/spoil our children (that being we society rather than we you and I) but running a school/ business we really didn’t have any choice.
Or have we overreacted in that they aren’t all that toxic? I’m feeling very anti just now in that my skin is reacting quite badly to two hours in the sun – very cross as I’ve been conscientiously sun creaming all term, and today it wasn’t sunny when we started so I just didn’t think of it. The stuff I read implied that the seed heads were the worst which is why I’m wondering about the proximity of my vegetable bed to the sole flower here.
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Jax
20 June 2008
oh, and on the street where I grew up, we all knew not to eat the laburnum pods. Right up until the point one of the boys dared one of the others and the idiot who gave in ended up in hospital 🙁 Proving that children can have all the information they need and still make really bad decisions. I do wonder whether the world is safer now though – I suspect not.
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Merry
20 June 2008
Well, i can see that in the strawberry bed is probably fairly tricky and i do see the point about toddlers and babies, though it has to be said i’ve never dug a leaf out of a toddlers mouth… but then i do think my kids were never very “mouthy.”
Foxgloves are supposed to be very toxic to rabbits but actually our larger rabbits have managed to nibble perhaps 1/4 of a leaf without having any side effects and although, googling, it says touching a leaf can give you a rash, i certainly never have had one.
You’ll have to re weed the bed yearly; we (this was going to be the point of my blogpost!) brought one small tub with about 3 in them in it and 2 years on they have completely self seeded a 10m x8m garden with probably 30-40 plants.
This link
http://www.mountlehmanllamas.com/foxglove.html
suggests large amounts of leaf eating can be poisonous… and in Shardlake (hardly scientific to quote a novel though!) they were poisoned with Digitalis and provoking vomiting saved them. Link above also seems to suggest this. Digitalis is a heart drug, so i presume death would be likely to occur from heart action interference rather than toxic poisoning… wonder if Helen/Jan have ever seen anyone poisoned with foxglove? Sure they’ll be along to tell us!
Did you know they used to put Digitalis drops in girls eyes to make the pupils relax so they looked doe eyed and sexy? (rolls eyes!)
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Merry
20 June 2008
This one IS a bit more scary….
http://whatscookingamerica.net/Information/Foxglove.htm
Not sure what i make of that… i mean, Amelie reacts like that to Pistachios and Pine Nuts, lots of people will have a violent reaction like that to something, i’m not sure if it would be said to be common or not.
Like i say, i’m almost guaranteed a near death experience after this… but i’ve been digging rabbits out of flower beds for weeks, i MUST have brushed the flowers loads of times, but i’ve never reacted in anything close to that way. I don’t think i’ve lived in a house without foxgloves in the garden in my entire life.
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Merry
20 June 2008
Oh no, the eye thing is Belladonna, i’m confused!
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Jan
20 June 2008
No, I’ve never knowingly met anyone who has ever been poisoned by a foxglove, or had a rash when they have come into contact with one.
Merry’s second link is obviously from someone with an allergy, as the symptoms she reports are not the same as the symptoms you would get with foxglove poisoning, and saying that everyone should pull all foxgloves out of their gardens would be like Anni saying nobody should ever buy bananas because she has an anaphylactic reaction when she comes into contact with them.
A quick scout through a bit of medical literature comes up with one case in NZ in 1999 when 3 men made themselves ill by eating it by accident and someone who had it in herbal tea by mistake in the US in 1980, but not much more, and no reports of children poisoned. Apparently it tastes really bad.
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Jax
20 June 2008
Hm, so have we overreacted? I’m going to say that we may have done – but it’s going to be far easier to be relaxed now that I know that they aren’t out there!
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Kris
20 June 2008
Foxgloves in the garden are fine – they attract bees by the zillion and look great. Yes the leaves are mildly toxic, but so are rhubarb leaves! It’s the seeds that are very poisonous, but they’re so fine and disperse widely when ripe that you would need to be very conscientious about collecting them. Now there’s a plotline for a book – hubby killed off by wife’s ‘poppy seed’ bread rolls…
There are worse things in the garden than foxgloves – nightshade looks like a flowering potato plant.
Not that I want to worry you or anything 🙂
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Tim
21 June 2008
I have always fancied having a bed of these.

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Merry
21 June 2008
I had a crisis of confidence and rung my mum last night, who said exactly what Jan did about the allergic re4action – and also said that given you can buy varieties of foxgloves by the gazzillion in garden centres, then they really can’t be considered a desperate risk. She did say though, that Lupins are as poisonous as Foxgloves, so if you worry about 1, you should worry about the other. Also, i think Clematis… which leaves you with potentially a big hole in the shrubbery!
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Liz
4 July 2008
We have foxgloves in our garden. In terms of medical herbalism, medical herbalists don’t tend to use digitalis anymore – it’s too unpredictable in terms of doseage apparently. As mentioned in another comment, bees love foxgloves. I also have white bryony in our garden – berries are poisonous and deadly nightshade (belladonna) – they seem to grow and were there when we moved in and keep coming up – I do pull them out once they start to berry because although I have a fairly sensible child I don’t want to take the risk (and they grow outside the garden, over the fence and in the hedgerows here so I don’t feel I am harming indigenous species in my locality – I have loads of other indigenous species that are not harmful in our garden – dandelions, nettles (Romans) and so on). We don’t eat berries is the rule unless mummy has specifically approved them – strawberries (which technically are not berries) or raspberries.
I can understand pulling them out of the bed with the strawberry plants and I do the same. It’s better to remove any association of deadlies with edibles.
In terms of yew trees, I have heard that the flesh of the berry is edible but the kernel is extremely dangerous and toxic. In fact I know of people who have eaten the flesh but it’s not something I would attempt or rely on to do as the risk would be too great. As a child I would regularly play in a grove of yew trees but knew that the berries were no-gos!
Going back to the foxgloves, they are biannuals from what I know of them and going back to the bees, it is great fun to listen to a bee foraging in a foxglove.
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