Information about poison ivy, oak, sumac and the skin rashes they cause
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.)
Poison ivy most often grows in two forms: a ground vine and a climbing vine.
But it is easy to show that the ground vine will become a climbing vine when it runs into a vertical to climb, such as a wall or a tree.
Toronto radio hosts Roz and Mocha talk about how Roz is dealing with a major poison ivy rash attack. This is the ONLY radio discussion of poison ivy on this site!
Here is a lovely example of poison ivy invading a typical hedge outside someone's house.
Note how the hedge is barely growing in the pleasant spring weather, whiile the poison ivy is jumping 6 inches up.
There is now a special anti poison ivy gardening glove available called NOMPI! Which stands for No More Poison Ivy. The gloves have long sleeves attached to protect forearms.
They are made with care by their inventor after she got one too many poison ivy rashes.
Here is a great example of poison ivy growing in a city and also coming over a rooftop. Looks like this vine started behind a wall, climbed up, found sunlight, exploded with growht in all directions, and sent out enough berries to feed a flock of birds.
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