Avoiding That Three-Leafed Noxious Weed

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I was weed-whacking in the back of our yard the other day when I noticed a familiar foe had reappeared amongst the azaleas and the pine straw, a three-leafed plant that has been the bane of my outdoor life since I was barely able to walk. Despite my best efforts last year to kill the crop, poison ivy had returned to the back boundary of our yard.

We avoid using pesticides, herbicides, etc. as much as we can. We buy organic vegetables, hoping the grocery stores are telling the truth. We don’t spray our own vegetable plants or flowers willy-nilly with chemicals, though sometimes we are forced to use sevin dust to combat whatever bugs start eating the leaves off the ornamental plants on the deck during the summer. But poison ivy receives no mercy from me. I marched to the Big Box Store last summer when I saw the massive crop out back — right after we bought this house — and bought the biggest spray jug available, with the largest skull-and-crossbones on the label.

Used to be, I could catch poison ivy just reading about it. In my native state of New Hampshire, all the bugs that bite and plants that cause one to break out in a rash pack a bigger wallop than they do down here in Texas. I know, everything is supposed to be bigger down here in the Lone Star State. That is largely true, but the shortened growing season up North for poison ivy and life cycle for mosquitoes and black flies forces these enemies of mankind to inflict their damage with maximum ferocity in the few months available before winter sets in — about Halloween, and lasting until right around Memorial Day.

That meant I would contract my first case of poison ivy usually before Flag Day since my buddies and I — Bruce Courtemanche, Peter Engel, brother Scott and others — would take to the woods to play army as soon as the snow melted. Our childhood redoubt was White Cape, an outcropping of granite nearly 550 feet high that was our private retreat. My childhood friend Bruce, who still lives in the town in which we grew up, bought the 14 acres that include White Cape nearly 30 years. It is still a magical place, well worth the cases of poison ivy I contracted tramping kthere as a child. I visited White Cape with Bruce a few years ago and came away with just a few mosquito bites and no poison ivy rashes.

I caught poison ivy as a kid in every imaginable — and a few unmentionable — places. I even once had it inside my mouth, which one would not think possible. (It is.) My mother, a registered nurse, would coat me in calamine lotion, which had little effect other than to add a sticky patina of pink to the itchy pustules covering my body. She finally lighted upon some type of acidic formula that stung like the dickens but managed to dry up the rash relatively quickly. I preferred the pain to the itch so didn’t complain.

As I evolved into an adult down here in East Texas, I still managed to catch a case of poison ivy most every summer. The worst case came in my mid-30s after trying to find a lost golf ball in the woods of the Diboll course. I should have known better but was trying to keep from losing to a Baptist preacher who had gotten on my nerves with his self-righteous attitude on the links. The course marshal had paired us up since we both were playing alone. I guess the Lord paid me back for my bad attitude with a humdinger case of poison ivy that stretched from my wrist to my elbow. Within a week, my arms looked like bratwurst sausages, and I had fled to the doctor for steroid shots.

Since then, I only catch the occasional rash, probably because I have developed an eagle eye for the accursed plant and apparently have evolved a middle-aged immunity — not that I am about to go rolling around in it. One of my favorite places to walk is the Lady Bird Trail in downtown Austin. The city kindly labels the poison ivy plants that crowd the edge of the trail, though, this being the green epicenter of the state, nobody is going to use poisons to kill this noxious weed. I get that, what with the river right there, dogs, kids, etc. But in my backyard, poison ivy is going to die, the sooner the better.

I took a shower soon as I was done spraying. I had already started scratching. I’m sure it was just my imagination, but you can’t be too careful.

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