I will go outside on my balcony, shivering in the icy wind, and take a picture of a plant that everybody knows (though might not recognise it in this bad condition here :-) .
After winter the plant looks ugly and unkempt - thus I decided that it will be best to throw it out.
And THAT would be very wise. Because I am speaking of Germany's "Poisonous Plant of the Year 2023".
It is - hoopla! - PARSLEY. Normal (but what is normal nowadays?) parsley, whether flat Italian parsley or curly-leaf parsley: both are poisonous.
How come that we all still are alive then? you might ask yourself.
And I may chirp: If you have children or grandchildren, you know that almost every plant on earth is poisonous: potatoes, lilies of the valley, yew tree, (but also box, did you know that)?
When our son was very young, I always had the telephone number of the poison-emergency call-centre with me - because as an unexperienced young mother - but well-informed on plants - I feared that a small child might put everything into its mouth.
I even became a murderer myself: I expurgated the laburnum that had settled on its own next to the entrance of my garden and showered the earth with hundreds of highly poisonous seeds - all parts of laburnum are very toxic. Twice in my life I became a whistle blower: I informed the garden authorities - once in Hildesheim, where the idiots had planted a wall of laburnum around a playground and who looked with admiration at the wall of a kindergarten that was flowered with highly poisonous nightshade - and second time four years ago in Berlin, where they had planted the very decorative ricin, the caster-oil plant around a huge sitting place with grass for the children and banquettes for the unsuspecting mothers.
But parsley?
I nebulously remembered that parsley in distant memory was used for pregnancy termination - and that Wise Women murmured that pregnant women should eat no parsley. And that's no old wives' tale: parsley can be poisonous - IF you eat it during or after the time it blossoms.
(Another saying in Germany was: "Parsley helps the man to get up on his horse and the woman into the grave", hinting at the aphrodisiac and the poisonous agent - though that may have been said before Linné, when parsley and celeriac in many old languages had the same name - even nowadays they still belong to the same plant family, the Umbelliferae.
The street for whores was called "Petersiliengasse" ("lane of parsley"), writes plant expert Marianne Beuchert. In England the word "parsley bed" also has an erotic meaning.
At the moment when parsley starts to flower it builds the poison apiol - the leaves, stem, blossoms and seeds of parsley THEN are poisonous, and kidney and liver and uterus can be damaged, and the stomach cramps.
But on the other hand we know that (young) parsley is delicious in soup, looks nicely on salad, and has many minerals and vitamins, is diuretic, and, and, and.
So: if you have parsley in your garden or your balcony: don't be too proud if it survives winter. Throw it out. Sow or buy new parsley - though folks say: ""parsley seeds must go to the devil and back nine times before sprouting" - and also: don't sow/put it into the same place as before.
