Description: This is
a VOA Special English Agriculture Report.
See text below
Text:
Just because a plant looks nice does not mean you
should eat it. Farmers learn this lesson tragically
sometimes when their animals feed on wild plants. In
fact, some of the nicest looking plants in the world
are the most harmful. They are best enjoyed from a
dstance.
A good example is belladonna. A "bella donna" is a
beautiful woman in Italian. The plant is also
beautiful. It has flowers like stars. It also has
shiny berries that start out green and turn purple
to black. But every part of the belladonna plant is
poisonous. Other names for belladonna include
devil's herb and deadly nightshade.
Yet just because something is dangerous does not
always mean it is all bad. Belladonna and other
poisonous plants have a long history of medical use.
The common or purple foxglove produces pretty
flowers along a tall leafy stem called a spike.
Foxglove can cause heart failure. Yet the plant is
part of a group called Digitalis that is used in
medicine to treat people with heart problems.
Several other plants present risks to people or
animals. Their names include coast fiddleneck,
common cocklebur, low larkspur and common groundsel.
Recently there was news from northern Germany.
Reports said a shopper at a market found small
amounts of groundsel in bags of mixed salad. The
average person would probably not have recognized
it. But this person knew about poisonous plants.
Many people happily recognize oleander. This
evergreen shrub produces beautiful flowers. They are
white, red, pink and other colors.
But officials in Southern California say someone
recently poisoned more than twenty show horses by
mixing oleander in their feed. Local newspapers say
the horses have recovered.
Amy Stewart is a best selling author of books about
the good and bad in nature. She lives in Northern
California and raises a poison garden of her own.
Her newest book is called "Wicked Plants." So which
plant does she consider the deadliest of all? Amy
Stewart says tobacco is the deadliest plant. It has
killed more people than any other plant. Ninety
million people have died because of tobacco.
And that's the VOA Special English Agriculture
Report. You can find other Agriculture reports as
well as transcripts and podcasts of all our programs
at our Web site, voaspecialenglish.com.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
