Information about poison ivy, oak, sumac and the skin rashes they cause
There are a few things to learn from this photo of your poison-ivy-nerd webmaster pointing at a poison ivy leaf as big as his head:
The leaves can get very big, typically in darker areas where they need to gather more light.
Here are three trees between a road and field. All three are covered with vigorous growths of poison ivy.
In fact, each of these could likely be stripped just by cutting the vines near the ground and just yanking the vines off the trees.
This image illustrates two points:
1. It is very common to find poison ivy growing in well-tended suburban condominium developments.
2. The plant will climb when it can, but also grows as a ground cover. (Also as a shrub, at times.)
Driving along a suburban road here in Massachusetts, I noticed this nasty poison ivy infestation on a wooden fence.
Hog peanut is a vine that can be very difficult to tell apart from poison ivy, and they sometimes grow on the ground together.
Hog peanut does not climb as poison ivy does, so if you find a vine on a tree or house it can't be hog peanut (though it could be Virginia creeper).
Here is a photo from a lovely small town in Pennsylvania.
Like many small towns it has quite a few attractive, solid, brick buildings from the early part of the 1900s.
We saw this nice little shrub between a parking lot and the road. It is some sort of blue-green evergreen shrub, but with a big mess of poison ivy erupting out of the top.
Sometimes it seems like poison ivy has a special love for utiliity poles, but in fact it will climb on anything that stands still.
Here is a curious one.
Did the person put the trespass notice OVER the poison ivy vines, or did the vines creep under the notice?
Our guess is that the sign was applied right over the vines, which means the sign-putter-upper probably had no idea what the vine was.
The two plants often grow intermingled, which creates extra confusion.
The five-leaved plant, Virginia Creeper, is a common gound cover that is sold in nurseries. (Touching it seems to bother some people, but it is not a national health scourge like poison ivy.)
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