Tuesday, July 22, 2008

This plant can blind you and give you second degree burns

Photobucket

Chet Scoville of Vanity Press warns us after his wife's emergency room visit. Luckily she did not get its sap in her eyes.

Update 2/10: Giant Hogweed is very similar and as dangerous.

2 comments:

Sorghum Crow said...

That is some nasty stuff. We have it in Vermont.

Down south the one to worry about is oleander.

ellroon said...

I have oleander in my yard. Luckily it doesn't spring up wild around here and being a bush, grows rather slowly. I've heard just regular decorative flowers like calililies and azaleas are toxic. You could make a poisonous soup out of almost everything in a basic southern California yard.

I was entertaining myself on a family trip with a Guide to Wild Flowers and was picking wildflowers in Northern California. I picked something that looked very much like Queen Anne's lace... and it turned out to be poison hemlock, a cousin to the wild parsnip apparently.

Washed my hands carefully afterwards...