SEVEN POINTS
I certainly hope that none of you take this as an open invitation to rush to your kitchen and throw together a special Yuletide salad of poinsettias! I have just become aware of the fact that the Poinsettia is not a poisonous plant. It is non-toxic.
What a bum rap that beautiful plant has have to suffer for the past hundred years or so. It seem I’ve been hearing that scary charge at least that long – give or take a few years.
Every time Christmas came around and the poinsettia became the favorite flower around our home we were warned and double-warned not to place them down low where the children and pets could die a horrible death because of their being there. We have a cat named “Angel” who likes to nibble on pretty flowers anyway and we had a family [photograph taken a few days ago, and we received a live poinsettia plant for being the umpteenth customer's or something. We brought the potted plant home and put it “way up high on a china press to keep the cat cat from eating it”. Until last week, you see, we though she might be doing harp exercises by now living up to her heavenly name on cloud-something or other in cat paradise. ”We gotta keep the cat away from it! It’ll kill her! I'll kill her dead!” And. double-said like that, it sounded even worse.
That statement is not true. It is not worth the letters it is written with!
The American Society of Florists have looked into the matter and they found that the “poinsettias kills” thing got started started in 1929 when the two-year old daughter of and some busy-brain lolling nearby noticed she had been chewing on poinsettia portions. Research at Ohio State University indicates that a fifty-pound child would have to consume somewhere between five hundred and six hundred poinsettia leaves - about one and a quarter pounds - to equal the amount given in their tests. Because of the longevity of the rumor, the American Society of Florists points out that the poinsettia has been tested and re-tested more than any than any other flower. The toxicity rate is so low that the ASPCA – The Animal Poison Center, Urbana,Illinois does not even recommend decontamination of animals which have eaten of the happy holidays flower. The American Veterinary Association has charts of poisonous as well as toxic plants and the poinsettia does not appear on any of them.
During the holiday weeks of the year 2000 The Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh and Carnegie-Mellon University Hospital found that nearly 23,000 cases of “poinsettia exposure”, as they list it, were reported to our nation's Poison Control Centers.
This Christmas Season give your poinsettia the place of honor. They deserve being featured fragrantly in the festive surroundings. Don't shunt them off to a high corner because of their alleged toxic nature.
A.L.M. December 14, 2004 (c502wds]
