Some of the plants you find outside look so pretty, but not all of them are safe to touch. Margaret talks about which kinds of plants are poisonous, including holly berries, mushrooms, and poison ivy.
Class Discussion Questions:
1) Create a warning poster telling people that they should not eat wild plants.
Read the Script:
[Margaret] One of my favorite summer activities is picking blueberries and one of my favorite autumn activities is picking apples. Lucky for me, Ohio is a great place to do both. But not every fruit or berry you find outside should be eaten despite how tasty they might look.
Let me share for you some of our state's plants that are best left alone. Starting with these festive guys, holly berries. The red fruit with those classic spiked leaves sure make a lovely holiday decoration, but eating these berries can give you more than a stomach ache. They will have you running to the bathroom and maybe even to the hospital. That's because they contain a toxic compound called saponin, which interferes with your digestive system.
The same thing goes with American mistletoe, which is also used in lots of holiday decorations. These little berries grow in the tree tops of Southern Ohio and contain toxalbumin, a toxic protein that is also found in some snake venoms. Yikes. Now while it's still okay to sneak a kiss under the mistletoe, keep those lips away from the decorations. Mistletoe and holly are often sold at home improvement stores and grocery shops around the holidays, but just because you buy them there doesn't mean they're safe to eat.
According to a 2018 report from the American Association of Poison Control Centers, when it comes to calls about people being made sick by plants, unknown berries and cherries were in the top five causes of plant-based poisoning. So unless like me, you head to pick-your-own berry patch, it's best to leave wild berries for the birds.
Well, how about a nutritious mushroom? Not so fast. Some wild ones can be deadly. Over 2,000 kinds of mushrooms grow in Ohio, but there's no test or defining characteristic to tell which ones are poisonous and which ones are okay to eat. This is according to the plant experts at the Ohio State University Extension. In particular, mushrooms from the Amanita genus, like this aptly named Destroying Angel, can be fatal if eaten. Or these false morels, which look nearly identical to edible morels. The fake ones are poisonous while the regular ones are an expensive delicacy.
[Man] Real morel versus false morel, okay? You can see under here, it's connected. With this false morel, see under there? It's not connected.
[Margaret] Some Ohio plants can make you sick without even eating them. These unassuming forest folks can cause major itchiness. I'm talking about poison ivy and poison sumac. They contain an oily sap called urushiol that causes skin irritation and they can be tricky to spot since they blend in with other plants around them.
Here are a few characteristics to look for. Poison ivy typically has three leaves. The middle one has a longer stem while the outer two leaves are shaped like mittens. Poison ivy can grow in the sun or shade. It can either be low on the ground or grow as a tall vine. Poison sumac like swampy areas and looks like a small tree. The branches have compound leaves. That means there are many smaller leaves connected to the same stem. You can see there's a single leaf at the tip with sets of leaves growing across from one another down the long stem.
Both poison ivy and poison sumac are deciduous. Deciduous means they shed their leaves at the end of their season. So in autumn, their green leaves turn red before falling to the ground. Now they may look pretty, but definitely are not worth the itchiness and blistery rash they cause. So I guess the moral, or should I say morel of the story is out in the wild, you can look, but don't touch and definitely don't taste.