Top 10 Poisonous Plants in the UK | THIS COULD SAVE YOUR LIFE!

[Music] hi guys nick here from hidden valley bushcraft and today we are going to be talking about britain's 10 most poisonous or deadly plants my first one i found giant hogweed now the giant hogweed heracleium manti gazanum okay is not natural to the uk okay so i'm just trying to gain access down to a bit of riverbank without going swimming and here i have in front of me look at the size of this guys i'm just under six foot and this thing is already getting on for a good couple of feet above me now what's interesting about this particular one behind me and i'm going to show you another one so that we can talk about their identifying features is purely down to its incredible size and you can see the umbella for us head because this is in the same family as the carrot the parsnip sweet sicily angelica and some of the other ones we're going to cover today okay this is in the apa shea family and is a monster just look at the thickness next to my hand of this stem this is absolutely massive if this is left this will go on to get up to reportedly 5.5 meters tall and this particular type of hogweed it has purple purple colorations on the stem and usually much more than this there's this purple mottling effect against the light green you see the leaves are quite aggressively jagged and i'm wearing gloves and rightly so because the sap from this will cause absolutely horrendous blistering and burning it'll make your skin a photo sensitive that means anytime you're out in sunlight and your skin is not covered you could be in in big trouble if you do suspect that you've brushed up against this stuff or it's been crushed and you've somehow come into contact with it what you want to be doing is covering that skin from daylight straight away and heading off to a e to get checked out the next thing you want to do tell your local council now to try and give you an idea i'm going to escape this little garden area and i'm going to show you a regular hogweed okay so here's a regular hogweed growing in the garden okay so here you see a very similar leaf pattern um much much smaller stem green and hairy the whole way along but none of that purple coloration happening there here we are down by the riverbank and i have got an example there that purple mottling on the stem and this thing is absolutely gigantic so we are back now here at the hvb main camp and we're just going to whiz around our section of the riverbank next to show you our next plant if you were perhaps taking up wild swimming or getting into wild swimming and you weren't aware of this this is why i'm making this part of the video the plant i'm about to show you is rather benign looking it doesn't have any special coloration which is going to tip you off or indicate that it's especially poisonous in any way shape or form and that's what's so dangerous about it okay guys so what i'm going to show you now is hemlock water drop wart okay and it's latin is oenthia crocata now this is especially lethal because it contains a cocktail of about several different types of alkaloid which unlike an alcohol is not recognized by your body's own renal system so you can't break it down you don't have the tool set if you get any of the sap from this plant here in your bloodstream perhaps if you were mowing or streaming down by a riverbank and you've got some of the sap in your eye and you didn't have goggles on okay that could actually get ingested that's going to be not good news for you this will literally kill in about three hours start to finish with no cure you definitely don't want to go ahead and eat it and ingest it that way it's also lethal to animals it's in every single ditch wet waterway dried up riverbed streams estuaries it's everywhere in the uk it's been around for an awful long time it's identifying features when we look closely to me it looks rather like celery stalks with a parsley leaf you'll see what i mean so very benign looking straight green stems coming up always always with its feet in water a very parsley looking leaf structure which is rather apt because it is in fact in the parsley family so we look at the umbles again it's going on to create those umbrella type flowers and if we look on the other side of the riverbank here you'll see many of them coming into bloom already now the big danger obviously if you're while swimming and you're new to it and you're climbing in and out of the water okay you might even use handful of this to pull yourself out of the riverbank that would be a big no-no so guys if you're into wild swimming or if your your kids are playing on the river banks have a good look around for this first identify it just tell them to stay clear of it it's as simple as that one of the two types of hemlock i'm going to show you today because the next one is going to be hemlock as well one of these two was actually used to kill socrates the ancient playwright and we only know as we leave this stuff here we only know of what he went through because he chose to have a scribe at his bedside okay and there were feelings of euphoria and then massive fitting dizziness and he died completely locked on cramped up really tight and so that's where it's thought the expression comes from the sardonic smile as in he looked at me with a sardonic smile i'm gonna keep saying this the whole way through the video if you're interacting in the outdoors or you're just getting into the outdoors this information could quite possibly save a life so i'm now on the hunt for hemlock because of the way this stuff grows and what we tend to teach here and the groups we work with we've done our very best to dig out most of the hemlock that we can just as i come into here you can see it's a bit like land of the triffids and just in this top part of the field is is this deadly hemlock which i just spoke about and this one is different this one's conium maculatum so we're going to have a closer look at its identifying features this one also contains that horrendous cocktail of chemicals so i'm going to pick one of the larger more established ones as it's showing much more of the more typical growth habits you'd expect to see now in terms of height this is already taller than i am but it's not going to get much further than this we're going to start to see these umbella for us heads once again if you look closely you'll see the purple coloration on the stem and that purple mottling which is very similar to the giant hogweed that i showed you just before and also quite clearly says don't come near me don't touch me can you see that purple all the way along here now when we look at the leaf structure the leaves are very fine much more the sort of arrangement that you'd expect to see on the carrot or the wild carrot um but this often gets mistaken for for cows parsley again absolutely lethal and would probably kill in about three hours with no cure known to us at the moment so again guys if you are interacting the outdoors if you're out on a dog walk you're hiking if the dog runs into a patch of this and your children are following them in things to think about guys so there we go so that was uh coney immaculatum hemlock onto our next deadly plant okay so for plant number four i have traveled all the way across the village to see some of our friends who have the most incredible ornamental garden and that's because uh it was really tricky to find a working example and what i have down here is known as monks hood or wolfsbane this is aconite okay this is more likely to be aconite carmichael or aconite napolis is the wild version and what we're talking about here is this plant as you can see the leaf structure the leaf shape is incredibly incredibly toxic okay and this is actually a contact poison that's why i've got the gloves on for this video this little plant has had many different names throughout history the most notable one is monk's hood because when it comes into flower later this year you'll see this drooping hood very much like the veiled hood of a monk and it'll be a deep royal blue almost purpley royal blue color but it's the leaf structure you really want to be taking a heat of and keeping the kids away from it's dark green i mean it's only literally up to pretty much just above my knee here and it grows in clusters like this and it almost has a multiple belled flower effect and you see many many of them drooping in the stand together you can find this in wild patches of land sometimes you'll find on the edge of beacon brecons and places like that here in the uk steer well clear guys okay so just handling it with a bare hand on the skin okay it's a contact poison that will go in and you can you can get yourself into a lot of trouble you certainly don't want to get any of this into a cut and you definitely don't want to ingest any of this because this can be fatal there is actually another one so number five we're going to go to is also in this walled garden it might be that you're out with the family you know interacting and you're in one of these beautiful establishments like this and one of the kids reaches out and touches something this is number five and also found growing in the wild but an awful lot more in people's gardens specifically is this euphorbia next to me here now there are a number of different types this is also known as a spurge you can get a wood spurge a sun spurge there's many different variants the one i tend to see is euphorbia euphorbia magdaloides but the way that this can damage you quite badly again is because it contains an incredibly caustic sap which will cause really bad burns if it's not so you can see on the edge of this little stone steps here if you maybe had a toddler playing here or something like that and they were to snap and they do snap relatively easy if you were to snap this stuff here you can see this milky sap coming out okay and i've got permission to damage this one today and you can see that milky sap there okay and that milky sap is incredibly i'm going to get some on my glove so you can see it incredibly incredibly caustic okay this stuff really really burns now what this was actually used for in ancient times is you might go to the uh apothecary i can never say it a pocket theory you go see the dock okay back in the day and you might have a boil or a water or something on your skin and they'd give you a solution of this to burn it off okay that's how badly the stuff can burn you it's normally a two-part deal in the first part of its life it grows it's just got this small head like this and again this one's gonna get broken off soon and you can see that white sap oozing out of there and then in the second part of his life it'll it'll start to push out a flower head or something similar to this now there's many variants of this and as i look around this garden i've actually seen a couple of different types but it's one to watch okay anything that's got that milky poison acidic sap is a big one to avoid guys let's move on then to number six okay this next one i've literally just pulled over and i'm hoping many britons will be able to identify okay so literally let's put the handbrake on this one here is in fact the foxglove and you can see the arrangement so there is this tall stemmed or tall bodied plant this arrangement of beautifully colored little pinky purpley bells okay and you'll quite often find bees hiding up inside here as well now what's particularly interesting in this this particular plant is if i was to pick a leaf okay this isn't so much a contact poison as i've spoken about this one in the past when i've talked about primrose okay and and its ability when it's young to look a little bit like a primrose if you were new to foraging so what this does digitalis purple rheum is it is an inhibitor the chemicals inside this inhibit the brain's message to the heart to continue beating and it has actually had a place in medicine historically and some of the organic chemical components in this have in fact been synthetically reproduced and are still used today as a digitoxin in certain medicine for people with heart issues that said this wild variant out here shouldn't be touched ingested chewed on or gone there just leave it as a pretty looking plant in the outdoors okay it's it's mega common it's everywhere here in the british isles in the uk i'd love to hear if you know of any more of it growing around the world what color of variants you have if you know this plant okay we know it as fox gloves let us know in the box and on that note if you're new to the channel i'm nick goldsmith from hidden valley bushcraft and today i'm taking you guys through my top 10 deadly or poisonous plants here in the uk let's uh head on over to plant number seven here's another great example of what i was just showing you guys with the fox glove but i wanted to come here and show you this more established plant so that we can learn to recognize what the leaves look like so the leaves themselves are very lancelot and pointed they've always got a point on the tip or on the end and a raised prominent vein on the back that you can see on show there now what's particularly interesting is these veins that come off the sides here they don't come off very horizontally they're much more in line with that primary vein okay they're arranged much more vertically than say something like the primrose and here's a great example you can see the color is very similar to that of a young primrose coming through so this is a fox glove that's what i've just showed you okay so this is just a leaf in its lighter color and then right next to it here is a perfectly edible little piece of primrose so you can kind of see because they share that tone and it also has a raised rib how you could get this wrong now the difference with the primrose is that the these veins are arranged much more horizontally going away from the plant whereas if we have a look at the back of this one you can see they go much more in line if i put the two together to show you you can see the difference there okay so on the left hand side is the primrose on the right hand side is the agitalis is the fox glove and those those veins coming away and then going much more in line whereas these ones are going much more horizontally the primrose will never have a pointer it's always a blunted or rounded tip the thing that catches people out when they're learning to forage is this color readily grabbing away at young primrose leaves and can get that wrong and that could be a deadly mistake to make we're in the woodland now and now we're thinking much more than a sort of nursery woodland kindergarten context and that being something that i have a bit of experience in so there are of course things that you're going to come into contact with down here in the woods the children are interacting and playing with all the time and it's about monitoring that helping them to identify and learn about these things from a young age and really putting them in good stead moving forward so if you are out for a day in the woods with the family this is the sort of thing you're going to want to be looking out for okay so here's a prime example i'm walking down through the woodland on a little path here and never much more than a couple of feet to the left or the right i might start to come across something like this okay guys so this is arum immaculatum or lords and ladies also known as the cuckoo pint plant and what's particularly interesting about this and it's lubed if you look it's sort of a lancelot pointy shape and it's lobes here it doesn't really grow very high off the floor that's not to say that it's not got some danger about it but in particular in the later stages and you can see this leaf is somewhat past its best it starts to grow this little stem with these seeds now these seeds will start to go as sort of an orange color bright orange color as they kind of emerge from these seed pods these are for some reason extremely inviting and enticing to small children who are wandering up something like a path like this obviously you've got a bench there you might sit down as a family have a picnic or whatever so just be wary guys okay so keep them away from this i mean it does look a little bit to a child a bit like green sweet corn so one to watch out for now this if ingested much more of a sort of stinging burning sensation contains calcium oxalate crystals that block the pores on your kidneys all round it's a nasty nasty if you do manage to ingest any of this you won't ingest a lot of it because it's just an instant reaction of no absolutely no a bit like you drop your sandwich in the sand on a day at the beach you'll know what i'm on about that gritty under your teeth definitely definitely avoid at all costs so that's arum immaculatum lords and ladies another common face to many of our woodlands here in britain is the presence of this here now this is dog's mercury also known as mucularis parentis this is in fact quite toxic should definitely not be ingested it's not so much of a if you touch it you're going to be poison type of thing but it's much more of a you definitely don't want to get involved with it or ingest any and because it's so close to the edge growing quite often in in in many of our woodlands it's all too easy for a small person to be picking away at this rubbing it in their fingers and then perhaps put their fingers in their mouth so one to keep an eye out for mums and dads if we have a little closer look you should see it has like a little flower spike but i think that is pretty much almost done with there's one here you can just make out that small spike on top okay but it's this leaf arrangement and it is only about 30 centimeters off the floor and it's always densely bunched in like this another little fact about dogs mercury is it is in fact semi-ancient woodland indicator for most parts of the uk there we go that's uh what's that now eight two more to go right we're gonna head over to a farm and i'm gonna show you the last couple so guys i'm up here on a working farm here in the uk i've come here because it's usually actually in the direct area around on on the outskirts of the farm yard that you're going to find all kinds of escaped plant species and things that have come in off of tyres of perhaps some of the machinery that's being used here and kind of escaped into nearby bushes and hedges now right next to me is in fact another deadly plant okay this is number nine and this is a tropa belladonna which is deadly nightshade now when we look at the deadly nightshade looks rather disarming when we take a closer look we start to see these purple flowers with these little uh yellow bits in the middle coming through and the actual leaf pattern itself it's quite distinctive you can kind of see that kind of pointed arrowhead with these two little lobes down near the bottom here there's enchances nightshade there's a whole bunch of nightshades if it looks remotely or can be mixed up with something else don't risk it so this has actually been used in the past form of a tincture for uh ladies and we're talking hundreds of years ago used to give themselves eye drops of this stuff to dilate the pupils of their eyes and make them more attractive why you'd want to do that i don't know it goes on to produce these lovely little clusters of blackberries obviously these are highly attractable to young children especially if you've been teaching your kids about blackberry eating and you know so that sort of thing and every year there are reported cases of of poisoning with this stuff highly highly toxic and potentially fatal so that's number nine and that is a tropo belladonna deadly nightshade so this is ragwort now ragwort's a bit of a nightmare and you can get different types okay and you can get different types of leaf that come on here but essentially it's a yellow flower that opens out and you'll see these arranged all the way throughout the field you can actually absorb it through your skin to make sure you're wearing gloves 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 it break it down so much because this becomes really quite deadly so yeah so this is sinisia jacobia ragwort it's everywhere certainly any farmer will be able to tell you about this and to avoid it i'd say that's my top 10 things that you are most commonly going to come into contact with here in the british outdoors hopefully that shed some more light and answered some more questions if i haven't covered something enough let me know in the box below thank you so much for supporting our youtube journey i know i keep saying this but it really is important this is everything to us so thank you thank you thank you

Channel: Hidden Valley Bushcraft

Views: 822,042

Keywords: bushcraft, bushcraft uk, cordage, dangerous plants, deadly plants, hemlock, how to identify poisonous plants, most poisonous plants, noxious weeds, plants, poisonous plants uk, survival skills, toxic plants, wildcrafting

Id: NQAawyKfIDc

Length: 20min 50sec (1250 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 27 2021