Once again I am using this blog as an extension to Twitter to express my honest opinions. This one is serious, of course, in the miseducation of youth but it is also quite amusing. It is a classic example of how you can sound authoritative even when you actually don't know the subject well.
I am not going to post the video in question here because I don't believe in posting false information myself as it only makes things worse, but there is a catalogue of errors in this short film which show some quite serious lack of competence.
First of all let's start with the video's scary title.
"Top 10 Poisonous Plants in the UK | THIS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!"
If you are going to give advice on identifying plants the first really essential thing is to be able to identify the plants themselves first.
Things do not bode well with the bad spelling of Hemlock Water Dropwort as Dropwart .
But then comes the bit where it starts to get amusing. We are treated to a long list of the qualities of Deadly Nightshade (Atropa belladona) while Nick the presenter tells us how to identify the plant held in his gloved hand.
The big problem though is that the plant he is holding and talking about isn't Deadly Nightshade at all!
Here is a picture from the video.
Those of you who know your plants will recognise them as being similar to those of the Potato ( Solanum tuberosum) and in fact they belong to the Bittersweet plant ( Solanum dulcamera) This plant is poisonous as are the green plants and the fruit of the potato plant, but it has a very different appearance to the Deadly Nightshade.
Of course you can guess what is coming now, can't you? We move on to ragwort with the following picture.
This isn't ragwort! It is really obvious it isn't ragwort. It is nothing like ragwort! Ragwort has daisy like flowers that peel open. It is very difficult to know precisely what it is from the video but my guess is that this is one of the larger Hawkweeds a Crepis species. The open flowers are more like dandelions than daisies.
Then we have to look at what he says about it, which is a complete jumble of nonsense.
The first of them is that he repeats a myth put about by the anti-ragwort campaign that has been analysed properly and found to have no basis in proper evidence. I have written about this skin myth before. He says,
"You can actually absorb it through your skin to make sure you're wearing gloves."
I've written about this myth so many times. The best thing I can so is point you to an article by two Dutch experts. Esther Hegt and Dr Pieter Pelser who is an Associate Professor at Canterbury University in New Zealand and whose PhD is actually on ragwort Ragwort poisoning through skin absorption. Fact or Fiction?
Regular readers will not at all surprised to find that the ultimate source is Professor Derek Knottenbelt who I have previously mentioned numerous times as a source of some really bonkers codswallop on the plant.
Then we get this set of garbled misunderstandings. No one denies the plant is toxic but this kind of thing doesn't help conservation at all.
"This is also dangerous to livestock. Now what's interesting is it's not so much while it's wet and green like this but when it's been dried up and it's found its way into dried food for animals later on or the next year by dried weight it's more potent because it hasn't got the the moisture for the animal to be able to dilute break it down so much because this becomes really quite deadly".
This is nonsense. The simple fact is animals don't eat the fresh plant but they will eat it if it is dried in hay. It has nothing to do with dilution at all.
