Are Plants Really Wicked?
There’s a tendency amongst writers, notably American gardening writers who have turned their attention to poisonous plants, to overstate the threat posed by these plants. I have one book, written some years ago, where the author states that plants from the Ilex genus, holly, are especially dangerous to children and implies that they should not be brought into the house at Christmas. This, of course, completely ignores the simple fact that millions of people have holly in the house each year and there are no more than one or two instances of mild poisoning in the past one hundred plus years. This same author states that ‘deaths’ are on record from eating large quantities of apple seeds. As a result, she says the seeds should be removed from an apple before eating. In fact, there is only one, poorly documented case where death from consuming apple pips is said to have occurred. Almost everyone leaves the core of an apple uneaten and, it could be argued, rooting around with a knife to rem
