On Sun, 24 Oct 2004 03:03:58 -0500, Archimedes Plutonium
wrote:

Today I was admiring some bright red bushes. And I did not know what
they were although I had learned a few names in my childhood hanging
around a nursery. I remember Lantana and Boxwood and Viburnum and
vaguely Eounymus.

And I saw some orange seeds on the bushes and decided to collect a few
to see if I can propagate next year. I was not sure of what bush it was
and had to wait to get home and search the Internet to identify. And is
usual of me to eat at least one seed, regardless of whether poisonous or
not. I know yew are poisonous. So I ate one of these orange seeds and
spit it out later for it was acrid. Later I found out it was Eounymus
and the seeds are poisonous.

But I suspect what they mean by poisonous is if eaten in large quantity
of say a bucket ful would kill you. I think scientists should do a
better job on something listed as poisonous. They should list as to how
much of Eounymus if eaten will come close to killing you.

They jolly well do. It is your unique combination of ignorance and
inertia that keeps you from going to any bookstore or library and
reading more than you would ever care to on the subject.

Euonymus has been used in medicine for many years. Google turned up
many accounts of Euonymus toxicity, including several scholarly works.

Not all ornamentals are as safe. The lethal dose of ricin is approx.
200 micrograms. A single castor bean may contain as much as 1000
micrograms.

When in the woods and seeing new plants for the first time with seeds on
them, I usually give them a sample taste test and if acrid or
unpallatable I spit them out and guess they are poisonous until
confirmed. I never sample mushrooms but even there, it is my
understanding that the deadliest mushroom takes a bit of quantity to do
harm.

Do that in California, where castor bean is a common weed, and you can
wind up dead.

I suspect there is not a single plant seed or leaf when eaten can kill a
person. I guess that these plant poisons have to be taken in quantity
such as the Yew berry in order to kill a person. So has any scientist
made a precise data sheet on poisons?

Many have. Because the occurrence of poisonous plants varies from
region to region, and because livestock poisoning is a significant
economic matter, the subject has been extremely well studied. For just
one of thousands of these works, see Fuller and McClintock, "Poisonous
Plants of California". For a very detailed online listing of some
important poisonous plants (from a source highly recommended to
someone who has so little sense as to ingest unknown plants), see
http://www.cookiebabyinc.com/poisonousplants/

--
Chris Green