In article <ILC8zu....@kithrup.com>,
Dorothy J Heydt <djhe...@kithrup.com> wrote:
         Farm kids are known to gnaw on the stalks of various plants (Thus
the grass stalk sticking out of the mouth stereotype: the shoots can be
tasty). Milk weed tastes pleasant. It's also, I eventually found out,
a good place to find cardenlide glycosides, which are a poison (and
sometimes a medicine). The symptoms are something like digitalis poisoning
although I think (but do not recommend testing) that to really feel the
effects you need a bird's cardiac system. Birds can have heart failure
simply being held gently in the palm of a person's hand (air horns are
_right_ out [1]). Apparently monarch butterflies get their nasty taste
and toxic flesh from eating milkweed but I think they eat the leaves,
which it never occured to me to try.

        Deadly nightshade is the only plant I have ever been able to get to
grow for me. There's a nice patch outside my office window, which I never
trim because, hey, it's the one plant that doesn't make it look as though
I practice scorched earth policies. One year, some of it infiltrated my air
conditioner vents. This was enough to provide my office with a nice
added atropine component, which I noticed mainly because it was really
messing up my eyes.  

                                                        James Nicoll

1: I am guessing if I had tried the air horn trick on the extremely fierce
owl chick I found, I'd be minus an eye.
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