Medicine is poison, but poison is medicine. A single dose will turn medicine into poison, and poison into medicine.
The main rule: if you are not sure that a plant is safe, — do not touch or smell it! This is especially important for children and pets!
People have brought the most beautiful flora from all over the world into gardens, but no one thought about the danger of these garden collections. And indeed, if we were to consider this now, we would have to cut down half of our gardens and parks, discarding the immense work of plant breeders in developing even more beautiful varieties of these formidable plants.
Beautiful dangers of Mediterranean gardens: common oleander, Peruvian thevetia, common lantana, arums, duranta, brugmansia, chinaberry, plumeria, wisteria, erythrina, alocasia, cestrum…
There are plant families that must always be treated with caution, for example, nightshades. In the entire family, at least some part of the plant contains toxic alkaloids. Ornamental nightshades include: brugmansia, cestrum, jasmine nightshade, potato tree, and tree tobacco.
The legume family also contains many toxic species: wisteria, erythrina, parkinsonia, brooms, gorse, retama, and laburnum.
Often, plants containing milky sap are toxic, and the sap itself causes dermatitis and mucous membrane burns. Examples include plumeria, ficus, fig, spurges, and schefflera.
Plants possess varying degrees of toxicity: from mildly toxic, where ingestion results in only minor discomfort, to deadly, causing, for instance, cardiac arrest and muscle paralysis.
Nevertheless, we believe that deadly poisonous plants in a private garden should be positioned as far as possible from children and pets, especially if they bear toxic fruit. For your children or pets to remain unsupervised in the garden, it must be entirely safe.
The purpose of this article is not to alarm, but to raise awareness. When strolling through a park or garden, we advise you not to touch the plants, but simply to admire all the beauty that nature has created. And teach children the fundamental rule of interacting with nature: if you do not know it, do not touch it!
Yana Danyuk
Principal Designer of Gardeniana. She creates designer gardens in Athens and throughout Greece.
