A Gallery of California’s Pacific Poison Oak in Many of Its Various Looks
Nice crop of green poison oak berries.
Pacific poison oak has berries with grooves like those in pumpkins.
The berries start out green, then get red or brown, but end up white.
You can see the berries changing to full red.
Here is a more dense plant with lots of berries, even as the leaves have fallen.
This view is almost like a diagram, showing leaves coming off the main stem, with berries hanging down.
As the berries dry out they turn white and stay on the plant for a long time. The provide food for birds.
You can see that this a dry section of California, but there is a dense bush of poison oak growing in the foreground.
This is particularly dense stand of poison oak, with stalks almost touching.
There is something specially lovely about California parks, but the big plant in the foreground is poison oak, just waiting for someone to stumble into it.
This trail had large overhanging poison oak shubs much higher than one might expect.
These tall, straight stalks of poison oak are common. Note the different colors.
This observer gives you sense of how large the poison oak shrubs are in front of a tree.
Poison oak is very much a part of California culture as we see in this picnic poster.
If poison oak climbs high up a tree you can end up looking upwards at it, as we see here with leaves and a crop of berries.
You can see many layers of the poison oak vine as it wraps around this host tree.
Before it can climb a tree or form a shrub, poison oak starts out as an innocent little seedling like this.
This is a good example of how poison oak can have lobes and notches, but not really serrated leaf edges. The other plant on the bottom left is behind the actual poison oak.
In hot sunny spots poison oak leaves sometimes curl up like this, probably to keep from drying up.
It is not unusual to see poison oak affected by this condition, presumably some virus or insect attack.
This is a bunch of very round but also frilly looking poison oak leaves.
Here we see how poison oak in one spot can be in many different stages: green, yellow, orange, and red.
This very dry gully nevertheless was host to a poison oak vine that was hanging on to a rocky edge.
Poison oak leaves turn color in the mild California fall, but not with the super colors that eastern poison ivy shows.
Poison oak leaves may start out red, like many young leaves, but turn green. It seems this growing tip is in the middle of changing.
This is the Tshirt logo put out by the St. Charles saloon for their annual poison oak show in Columbia, California. Not clear if this is still going on, but but hopefully it is.
The show was a loose, fun thing run by a group of locals who knew how to have fun.
A contestant gets a prize for her poison oak display. Hopefully she is immune to the plant.
There are various categories in the poison oak show; this was clearly in the more creative side of things.
Please be advised that this is a goof: don’t be making sushi with poison oak.
This stylish fellow presented a small poison oak tree as his entry to the show.
Someone did a nice job creating 5 different versions of poison oak beers… at least the labels.
The logo was also available on black, a stylish Tshirt.
