[PCA] ARTICLE: What You May Not Know About Poison Ivy

[Park, Margaret E]

Margaret Roach, NY Times, May 12, 2021


Pop quiz: What’s an ecologically important native flowering plant, found in every one of the continental United States but California, that almost everyone hates?


The qualifier “almost” makes room for the dissenting opinion about poison ivy from Susan K. Pell, a botanist and educator, and the deputy executive director at the United States Botanic Garden in Washington. Her career-long fascination with poison ivy is not based on a personal immunity to urushiol, the oily resin that is the active compound in all the plant’s parts — from seed and leaf to woody vine — even when it is dormant.


Exposure to just 50 micrograms of urushiol, equivalent to less than a grain of table salt, causes a rash in 80 to 90 percent of adults, according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health at the C.D.C. Ms. Pell, the former director of science at Brooklyn Botanic Garden, does get a mild rash from poison ivy, as she has since childhood. But that did not stop her from choosing the plant and its relatives as her research specialty in graduate school — or examining related plants down to the molecular level, as she has done since then, teasing apart the who’s who.

Full story here<https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/realestate/poison-ivy.html>
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