Questions We’re Often Asked: Poisonous Gift Plants

Exasperated at aspersions being cast upon poinsettias, the late John Bradshaw ate a salad of the leaves in front of a suitably impressed Toronto audience. Bradshaw went on to live for many more years devoted to propounding gardening lore.

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This is not to suggest that you do the same for seasonal guests. Bradshaw raised his poinsettias sans pesticides. Commercial poinsettias are grown for decoration, not for nosh. Like other gift plants that brighten the home at this or any other time of the year, they have likely been doused at some point in their culture with pesticides. This is not to say that any, if raised otherwise, might not be edible. Christmas Pepper, Capsicum annua, with bright red, cream or purple pods is such, although scorching hot. Incautiously handled, they may cause severe skin irritation. Poinsettia, as Bradshaw proved, also might make a tasty dish – it is said in its native Mexico to be used thus. “Salad’s on a new footing now,” as Alan Bennett once said on another matter. Then again some are most certainly not. Jerusalem Cherry, Solanum pseudocapsicum, covered with orange berries the size of a largish cherry is a virulent example. These are particularly tempting for children who will then require medical attention, pesticides or no pesticides. Although untreated with pesticides, mistletoe berries are also poisonous so it is perhaps just as well that it is usually supplanted by artificial imitations. Similarly holly berries may be relished by birds but are poisonous to humans along with ivy, another introduction from jolly Olde Englande. Again, both are widely available in artificial form. Perhaps it is true then, as Tom Lehrer once satirically suggested, that it is “all the marvellous ways they’re using plastic nowadays.” It is a case of, as the French say, La Belle et la Bete: ‘The Beauty and the Beast.’

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