Discussion: The beauty of poison oak

New York Times story.

"COLUMBIA, Calif., Sept. 22 - It is peak season for fall foliage, when the foothills of the Sierra Nevada ... turn spectacular shades of crimson and russet.

...

Let leaf-peepers in New England ooh and aah over maples and mulled cider: here, fearless citizens like Bob Beck, a 69-year-old floral designer, risk dermatological disaster to harvest comely sprays of Toxicodendron diversilobum for what may be the country's strangest autumn ritual: the Annual Poison Oak Show.

"It's like a Visa card," Steve Bechtold, a park interpreter, said of the pervasive species that turns the California landscape, as well as human skin, a vivid red. "It's everywhere you want to be."

..."

You don't have to go to CA. We have our own here in CT: the dark, shiny green of poison ivy is now turning a brilliant red. What a lovely center-piece that would make.

Poison Ivy is still mostly green here in Missouri, but boy do we have a lot of it. I don't ever recall seeing so much in our woods. I'm thinking that the dry summer limited the canopy somewhat, so more sunlight was getting to the forest floor.

We had so much more rain than usual this year, followed by copious sunshine, that our woods are carpeted with poison ivy as well. I'm on a prednisone dose pack for it right now... :-(

As if things weren't bad enough, recent research indicates that the plants that benefit most from increased CO2 in the atmosphere are in the genus Toxicodendron, and it also causes them to produce more urushiol. Lovely.

So...Our orienteering future entails huge fields of poison oak and ivy, that we'll have to learn to navigate through. Similar to the stands of laurel on NEOC maps today.

But thankfully, we now have TechNu...the urushiol removing agent, originally developed to remove radioactive fallout.

I used to be very susceptible to poison oak; a single dose would keep me out of school for weeks, administering large patches of my body where the skin sloughed off, leaving raw flesh constantly oozing yellow pus.

But with TechNu, I can now run with abandon through fields of the stuff. When I come home I toss all clothing into the laundry, take a good shower, and rub TechNu into susceptible areas such as forearms, neck and various private areas. If any blisters develop, I immediately rub in more TechNu, very roughly so as to break the blisters and expose the flesh underneath to the medicine. Within a day or so everything dries up. I haven't had a serious outbreak of poison oak since I began using TechNu.