elodieunderglass: mugwomps:glumshoe:glumshoe:glumshoe:Here are some reference photos for ide
elodieunderglass: mugwomps: glumshoe: glumshoe: glumshoe: Here are some reference photos for identifying poison ivy. It’s not as easy as people make it sound. Poison ivy looks different depending on the time of year, the leaves may be atypically shaped, and occasionally they may even have five leaves instead of three. That’s just the… beauty of nature, I guess. Some tips: Leaves, especially young ones, may have reddish tints to them. The vines that grow on trees and other structures are often ‘hairy’ and have thousands of little roots anchoring to the surface of whatever they’re climbing. Dead plants may still cause allergic reactions. The stem on the central leaf may be slightly longer than the stems of the other two. Poison ivy is a shrub, so the stem is relatively inflexible and woody, as opposed to more flexible herbaceous stems (as on, say, dandelions). Sometimes the outer sides of the side leaves form notched/jagged “mitten” shapes…. but sometimes the leaves are all smooth. The “veining” in each leaf is not symmetrical - the lines extending from the center of the leaf will usually alternate and not match up on both sides. They also grow white/yellowish clusters of berries: Also: don’t burn poison ivy. You do not want to inhale urushiol smoke. Poison ivy in your lungs is not a pretty business. The oil can also be transferred to your skin from pet fur and clothing. Climate change may actually be making poison ivy (and oak, and sumac) more dangerous than it has been in the past. Higher carbon dioxide levels encourage the plants to grow larger leaves and produce more powerful urushiol. So. There’s that. I mentioned this in the other post, but I’m seeing a lot of people in the tags saying that they are “immune” to poison ivy. I have bad news for you! You’re not immune at all, your body simply hasn’t learned to respond to it…. yet. Some people are born with a high tolerance to the chemical urushiol, which is the toxic irritant in poison ivy, poison oak, poison sumac, and mango skin (also cashew shells and ginko trees). You may lose that tolerance at literally any time. The likelihood that you will react increases with each exposure, and reactions may become progressively more severe. You could go from being unaffected to being hyper-sensitive overnight. My uncle never reacted and believed himself immune, until one day he walked through a patch of poison oak and had to be hospitalized. Now he’s so sensitive to urushiol that he can’t handle mangoes unless someone else has carefully removed the skin. The same thing happened to a good friend of mine - several years ago, she accidentally ate a poison ivy leaf and didn’t react, but last summer she was doing yard work and got it all over her body and had to treat it with steroids to prevent scarring. Poison Ivy is a pernicious liar The picture of the vine going up the tree with its horrible hairy filaments gave me a straight-up startle response. -- source link