dirt / By Amy Stewart

Lessons from the Road

In which your author learns that even everyday plants have their wicked side

(July 9, 2009)  For the last month I’ve been on a book tour. Book tours consist of long periods of time away from home that are mostly spent wandering around in airports, reading incomprehensible driving directions while missing exits and finding creative ways to run your bar tab through the expense report as a bridge toll or a parking fee. On certain days you end up at a bookstore or a radio station, at which time people will tell you stories about the exquisite pain that has been inflicted upon them by plants.

Apparently the natural world is even more dangerous than I had been led to believe. Consider the following:

Brugmansia. Photo by Amy Stewart

GALLERY >

Euphorbias can blind you. This should be an obvious one. Anybody who grows euphorbias in the garden knows that they produce an irritating milky-white sap and should be handled with care. What I did not know about, however, was the dreaded Euphorbia Splatter. Not one person but two told me that they had been out pruning their euphorbias when some of that nasty sap flew into their eye (or, in one case, seemed to simply vaporize in the heat and send its stinging vapor death rays straight up), causing horrible pain and long-term eye damage.

Seriously. Long-term damage. One woman told me that her eyesight has still not recovered, a year later.

Both of them told me that they waited too long to even go inside and wash their eyes; that doing the stand-under-the-shower-for-a-long-time routine helped a little but not much; and that they now wished they had dropped everything and run off to a doctor or clinic where they could have gotten a professional eye-washing.

So. Remember that. Maybe garden with sunglasses, I don’t know.

Rose thorns can give you a disgusting disease. Three people told me their tales of woe regarding ‘“rose thorn disease,” otherwise known as sporotrichosis. It’s caused by a fungus found on rose bushes, and a deep puncture wound with a rose thorn can introduce it into your bloodstream, where you will enjoy such symptoms as disgusting lesions, infections of the joints and nervous system and other such horrors. Treatment is difficult. One guy I met spent a week in the hospital and still wasn’t totally recovered.

And once again: Their regrets? Failure to seek immediate medical attention. They did what I do in the garden: They toughed it out. They yanked the thorn out, wiped the blood off with their muddy sleeve and kept gardening. If only they had given themselves a little simple first aid, these people told me. Just gone inside for a minute, really cleaned up that little cut, maybe used a little ointment, put a good bandage on it — maybe that would have made a difference.

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