Sneaky Plants That Fight Back By Pat Gibson Visit the source of the poison ivy picture.

Here above Sulfur Creek, we have our share of poison ivy. In fact, I try to keep one or two plants around so I can teach the Girl Scouts how to identify that sneaky plant. Some folks only think they know what poison ivy looks like. A neighbor of ours spent several days clearing out what he thought was poison ivy only to discover that the ivy doesn't have prickles. What he cleared out was one of the best dewberry patches around. Well, maybe it will grow back.

Virginia creeper is another vine that is mistaken for the pesky ivy. It has five or seven leaves and they are symmetrical. The ivy will have three leaves and the outside two look a little like mittens. They have thumbs or bumps on the upper side as if you were holding your hands with your wrists together in front of you with your thumbs up.

Another plant that can get you scratching is the stinging nettle or bull nettle. It is a tall, big leafed, fleshy plant with prominent white flowers and white fuzz all over it. The fuzz looks like ice crystals or spun glass. That fuzz is what gets to you. If you brush against it with your bare skin, it burns like crazy! Now some folks claim that you can harvest the nettle, wash them with boiling water and eat them, but I'd have to be very hungry before I'd eat a nettle. One book I have says that the seeds are very tasty also, but there again, I'd have to be very hungry. I have heard that any pasture that has nettles growing in it has good soil.

Some time back we held a Girl Scout camp out called 'day camp' at a home over off Circle Drive. When the girls sat on their sit-upons and stretched out their bare legs, they started complaining about stinging and broke out is red rashes with bumps. The rashes itched and were very painful. After some searching, we found a small, innocuous plant with bright yellow flowers and leaves shaped like lance heads. It was covered with a fine hair and when we picked it we knew that was what had caused the girls to break out. It really stung.

We sent a sample over to the Parks and Wildlife and asked for help. They sent us back word that this was a member of the hibiscus family commonly called 'nose burn'. It never grows more than three or four inches tall and is usually found in distressed areas. By that they meant an over grazed pasture or the back part of a construction site that hadn't been re seeded. It has earned its name because cattle and horses that graze in an over grazed pasture will develop sores that look like burns on their noses from the irritation of the plants. We found that the best first aid was to wash the area off with soap and water and apply some hydrocortisone cream or ice cold rags. Washing off is about the best first aid for any irritant from a plant, be it stinging nettle, nose burn or poison ivy.

Some members of the hibiscus or mallow family are more pleasant to be around but that's another story.

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