Information about poison ivy, oak, sumac and the skin rashes they cause
I had appeared on local media, talking about my favorite topic: poison ivy. After the show, a fellow contacted me to tell me about an abandoned barn in New Hampshire that he said I had to see.
When poison ivy climbs it grows thousands of tiny red root hairs to attach to the tree, wall, or other vertical surface.
When the leaves fall, many trees, fences, and buildings are revealed to be covered with masses of poison ivy vines. See how this very aggressive vine covers not only the poor tree, but also layers of other poison ivy, all scrambling upward in a nasty competition.
A research paper has just been published about the difficult invasive weed, Japanese knotweed. Seems that in some kinds of forests, this weed is taking over the understory and preventing new tree saplings from growing, thus threatening the future of these forests.
Up here in central New England, 2017 has had an extremely late first frost. (I wil forgo discussion of global warming to avoid the hate mail that such topics generate.)
I knew without getting close that this red vine was NOT poison ivy. How did I know for sure?
Because I took this photo in Turn, Italy, and there is no poision ivy in Italy, nor anywhere in Europe, for that matter.
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It has been an absolute rule: "Leaves of three, let them be." If a plant has more than three leaves (or leaflets) in a group, then it simply can not be poison ivy.
I have been getting a number of images of a strange looking plant asking if it is poison sumac. And it is a strange one, with big berries that turn purple. But it is NOT poison sumac.
In spite of its generally tough-guy attitude, poison ivy is one of the first plants to give up and turn colors in the fall. Which makes early fall a great time to look for it. Often you can find trees, walls, or the ground itself covered with bright red, orange and yellow leaves.
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