A 40-year-old woman has died after eating highly poisonous wild mushrooms picked from a botanic garden in the Isle of Wight.

A second woman in her twenties is seriously ill at St Mary’s Hospital, Newport, where her condition was described yesterday as stable and conscious.

The names of the two, who are related, were being withheld last night. They are believed to have tasted the fungi – possibly death cap mushrooms – on Monday after the younger woman had collected them during a visit to Ventnor Botanical Gardens the previous day.

Police were called to the older woman’s home in Newport just after 7am yesterday. Despite efforts to revive her she was pronounced dead by paramedics.

An hour later officers were called to a second house just over a mile away, where they found the younger woman in need of emergency medical treatment.

Police said that the younger woman told them how she had picked handfuls of wild mushrooms with her husband at the gardens on Sunday.

The death is not being treated as suspicious. Officers have recovered mushrooms from the woman’s home, which are now being investigated.

The Isle of Wight Council, which runs the gardens, said in a statement: “While the circumstances are currently being investigated, it appears a large quantity of wild mushrooms – including the toxic death cap mushroom – were collected from the vicinity of Ventnor Botanic Garden earlier this week and subsequently eaten. The death cap mushroom is not cultivated by Ventnor Botanic Garden – no mushrooms or fungi form part of the displays – but is believed to have been growing wild in the 22-acre site. Death cap mushrooms are a common species found all over the Island and the UK.”



[link to www.shroomery.org]