It has been a cold, late spring up here in New England, but today will reach the mid 80s, so plants will be exploding into full leaf.
Poison Ivy
Poison Oak
Poison Sumac
Information about poison ivy, oak, sumac and the skin rashes they cause
The Poison Ivy - Poison Oak Blog
It has been an absolute rule for over a century: "Leaves of three, let them be."
Poison ivy has only three leaves (actually leaflets) in a group. And that is still true about 99.9999% of the time.
April 13, 2018 - 11:47am
As spring rolls around, poison ivy is one of the first plants to emerge. Spring leaves are usually red, but many new leaves are red, so that's not enough to go on. See our ALWAYS-NEVER criteria for deciding if a plant is poison ivy.
March 28, 2018 - 11:22am
When you cut down a tree, the sudden presence of sunlight encourages poison ivy vines to grow into the gap.
Here is a stump where the white snow highlights how the vines, with nowhere to climb, start reaching in all directions, looking for something else to climb up.
March 14, 2018 - 9:39pm
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.
February 23, 2018 - 5:15pm
When poison ivy climbs it grows thousands of tiny red root hairs to attach to the tree, wall, or other vertical surface.
December 22, 2017 - 11:11am
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.
November 27, 2017 - 11:08am
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.
November 15, 2017 - 5:53pm
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.)
November 11, 2017 - 6:46pm
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.
October 13, 2017 - 5:06pm
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