(no subject)
Okay. I was going to make a huge entry about my weekend, but maybe I will do that later. Even though it's getting close to next weekend... Right now I'm just taking a little break to tell a good story about yesterday. So I was in bio, keying out the last few plants for my collection, and I was a little confused about this one plant. I knew it was in the lily family, but I wasn't sure about the genus. It looked kind of like the pictures of wild onions in the book. One of the characteristics for that genus, not surprisingly, is an onion odor. But I didn't smell anything really onion-like, so I thought, "Hmm, maybe it tastes like onions..." I then proceeded to nibble on the stem a little bit, and it definitely didn't have that strong onion taste. So I kept looking through the book for what else it could be. When I found the genus and species (Zigadenus venenosus), I noticed that one of its common names is "death zigadenus". I get a little concerned at this point. Then I see that the vernacular name for the genus is "Death-camas". Great. It is also one of the area's most virulent stock-poisoning plants. I started to feel a little dizzy, but that was probably just me freaking out. Then I was fine. Kind of scary though...if I had taken an actual bite out of the stem or eaten some of the flowers, I probably would have been poisoned. Moral of the story: don't eat plants if you don't know what they are. The End.