Poison Ivy / Pine relationship and replacement plants

General Discussions
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I recently got the right gear to be able to fully dive into poison ivy and start pulling it in mass. I quickly learned that almost all of my poison ivy is coming from a row of decaying pine tree stumps along my back yard. I’ve also observed large quantities of poison ivy in a friend’s garden, in the spot where her pine wood fence is decaying. So it seems poison ivy might be attracted not just to disturbed soil, but specifically to disturbed areas where pine has been cut down.

So a least locally I found a correlation, but is there a root cause? Does the fungus in decaying pine work symbiotically with poison ivy? Are there compounds in the wood that deter most other plants?

Then the most important question - who else can fill this niche and reduce the chance of getting rashes in the garden? Poison ivy does tremendous work for the soil, making balls of fuzzy roots and weaving its vines crisscross across eroding hills. I feel a little bit guilty pulling it up, but I know that ultimately I’ll be introducing more life and fertility in places where I can reasonably walk without having all my skin melted off. So what do I plant around these pine stumps to keep the poison ivy at bay? Virginia creeper is the first I think of, but it often mimics poison ivy, and the two seem more than happy to cohabitate.

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Poison ivy just likes that edge zone, pines offer filtered light and fallen trees allow more light and decay/moisture. It is just as happy under oaks and most other trees. Even climbing through cedar trees.

Virginia creeper is what I try to promote. They will grow together but at least it is competition.

I always thought it would be an interesting breeding project to try to select for less oil and create a “poisonless” poison ivy. Any volunteers? :grin:

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This is such a timely topic for me!

I’m curious what your gear consists of?

I have epic level poison ivy problem ( also associated with huge vines growing up standing dead pines.) So much of it was coming up in my previous garden area this year that I had to plant elsewhere.

Last week I suited up in tyvek and gloves and tried to do a round of manual removal pulling up the roof mats. I feel like I hardly made a dent and got a horrible break out in-spite of my protective measures and showering immediately after. :grimacing:

As for replacements there are so many other great vines that grow in the same habitats but they all seem to get along fine and poison ivy is often mixed right in with Virginia creeper, crossbones, smilax, muscadine, etc. I’ll keep in mind walking around my property to see if I notice any healthy vine areas that don’t have poison ivy in the mix but my guess is it would take invasive tendencies to keep it out. for instance the parts of my property infested with English ivy don’t seem to have poison Ivy but that’s not a good trade off. Where kudzu is thick it kills off poison ivy but not on the edges where it’s trying to establish, those areas I see both.

Just yesterday I planted some Macuna beans at the base of some dead privet that have poison ivy & mixed vines climbing them to see if they can outcompete.

As for poisonless poison ivy I’m all for it but that’s gonna need some test for urushiol levels other than rubbing it on one’s arm for reaction lol.

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I have poison ivy growing in parts of my garden. My order of preference is:

  1. Leave it be. Place plants that can coexist, next to it, to block access
  2. Train the poison ivy away from areas where i might contact it. A stick works well
  3. Prune away excessive growth

It’s a difficult plant to eradicate, and efforts to eradicate it are very likely to result in the contact dermatitis for which it is famous. I don’t experience problems with it because i don’t directly touch it, and i treat it with care and respect when i must interact with it. Even when i prune it, I’m as gentle with it as i can be. Crushing the foliage releases the oils that are problematic, so i don’t do that.

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I’m doubtful that poison ivy has a preference for pine any more than anything else. I also doubt that it can simply be crowded out by planting something else. I am allergic to poison ivy and do all I can to eliminate it from my property. If you have little plants coming up all over the place it is because somewhere nearby there is a big one dropping seeds, birds also spread the seeds. For little plants I just put on gloves and pull them up. I’m careful about it so as to pull up as much root as possible, instead of breaking it off. If I find a big one going up a tree, I use a long-handled clipper, first gently grabbing it and pulling a section of its trunk off the tree. Then I cut it close t to the ground. I just leave it there with its trunk dangling in the air.

After working on a poison ivy purge, I immediately wash with cold water and lots of oil cutting soap like dish washing liquid. Gloves and any clothes that may have touched it stay outside until next laundry day or washed in a bucket outside with lots of degreaser soap.

I have a hate, hate relationship with poison ivy because my reaction to it is pretty strong. I would much rather suffer a little exposure in eradicating it than brush against it by accident and maybe without noticing until later.

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Our property came to us quite overgrown… Hackberry, cedars, green briar, Virginia creeper, poison ivy, etc. but I’ve begun to notice trends. Creeper and briars will grow in drier areas, while ballon vines like marshy areas, and PI likes it closer to the pond, but not marshy. PI wants access to water. Rotting wood holds water well, so that might be what you are seeing. Or the PI was growing up that pine, since it is parasitic somewhat. Yes, wear gloves, long sleeves, long pants etc when you are pulling it, unless you are that rare and blessed person who just doesn’t react. When you are done, wash promptly, hands even before you undress.

Also, PI is just opportunistic, like many plants/ weeds.

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Thank you all for chipping in! The poison ivy being promoted by the spongy, water holding dead tree and the edge environment makes a lot of sense. I like the idea of training it away and avoiding it, but there is so much of it and as long as my poison ivy suit continues to work I’m going to keep removing it. I do make sure to thank it when I’m pulling it, and assure it that it’s not my enemy I just need it out of the way so I can garden…

So my poison ivy suit, its a bunch of layers:

first thing, I put on nitrile gloves, so I can take them off at the end when I go inside to shower.

Then my base layer, all washable and stored in their own box away from the other stuff: long socks, underwear, jogging shorts, t shirt, and a head-sock thing. I tie my hair back very tight under the head sock thing. And long socks with holes that I wear like arm warmers, as wrist protection. A neck buff would be nice too but I don’t have one.

Then the coveralls. Its this one from tractor supply, $60 and has plenty of plus size options: https://www.tractorsupply.com/tsc/product/berne-mens-twill-standard-unlined-long-sleeve-coverall-1057448

Then safety goggles, a big clear plastic face shield, leather gloves, and rubber rain boots (also the cheap ones from tractor supply).

So far I’ve gone into the thicket twice with this gear, and filled up a 55 gallon composter barrel with mostly poison ivy vines. I’m really careful when I take off the outer layers, and I shower with dawn dish soap right away and wash my under layer asap, treating it as contaminated until it’s washed.

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When I lived in the Great Appalachian Valley, I observed poison ivy was more prevalent under my white pines than elsewhere - I also noticed the birds that eat poison ivy berries were also quite fond of the trees - every morning I watched the birds work their way through the branches, hunting for bugs mostly. Their droppings left many plants - blackberry brambles were a common one, as well as Japanese honeysuckle, Japanese privet, Virginia creeper, but mostly poison ivy.

Originally I hated poison ivy and felt distressed by how it made up most of my landscape. But then I learned from Euell Gibbons to eat the young leaves in the beginning of spring, and to eat the leaves every day to build “immunity”. It sounded crazy and I didn’t trust him, but I did a deep dive into it, and there was even research in the 1980s that involved injecting the irritating oils from poison ivy into the body and that reduced skin reactions to the oil. Something about the immune cells in the body recognizing the oil. So I decided to try it, and despite my fear and skepticism, it basically worked.

Eating poison ivy didn’t fully solve getting rashes for me, but it made rashes much less common and less severe, to the point that I comfortably would rip out poison ivy with bare hands (usually I only got rashes when I would break the roots on my bare hands, at that point).

I have to eat new poison ivy each season to keep up strong enough “immunity” to be able to touch it without getting rashes. Sometimes my confidence exceeds my immunity and I end up with a normal rash like I used to get, but usually only when I was being reckless (like using my bare hands to rip out poison ivy roots, and then not sufficiently washing the oils off later).

Anyway, don’t trust me - I didn’t provide any receipts and it’s a wild claim. But sometime I might go back and dig through the articles I have on it and make a post with what I’ve found.

I don’t recommend people eat poison ivy; I was eventually comfortable trying it myself and it worked well for me - but that’s not a basis on which to recommend it to others.

Though, I notice deer broadly enjoy grazing on poison ivy, and I have actually come to take a liking the taste of young poison ivy leaves - even noticing genetic diversity in the plants and developing preferences for certain kinds of plants over others (e.g. some plants I noticed were less tender and had almost a hairy texture - I found that off-putting, so I didn’t eat it. I preferred the glossy, smooth leaves that are tender and tasty).

Poison ivy always won the local honey awards, too - but the competitors didn’t want to label their honey “poison ivy honey” (for obvious reasons), so they would name it something vague like “wildflower honey” instead. Poison ivy is a keystone species, and once it was no longer a threat to me, I came to appreciate it a lot more - and now I mostly just let it grow where I can.

But yeah, I always wanted to figure out why poison ivy thrived under my white pines in a more rigorous way - but my guess was just that it’s seeds from the birds.

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Now I’m super curious! What does poison ivy honey taste like?

I love monofloral honeys. My favorite that I’ve tried so far has been raspberry – the honey has such a sweet beforetaste and such a deeply floral aftertaste.

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sadly I never got to taste it (that I know of!), I was in a master beekeeping course and overheard the kibitzing of beekeepers who were at the honey competition - but I’ve always wondered about poison ivy flowers ever since - maybe someday I’ll be able to taste some of its nectar!

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I did a search online, because I was curious, and it looks like . . . it tastes like honey, with a bitter/herbal aftertaste, unless you age it for a year? Then it has a caramel aftertaste instead? But take that with a grain of salt, because that’s what Google AI said, and I don’t know what its sources were.

The person on this website describes poison oak honey:

I want to try all the monofloral honeys! (Laugh.) They all sound so interesting!

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When I was a little kid, it seemed like all I had to do was look at poison ivy and I would be covered with it the next day. I’m still allergic to it but not as bad as then. It is an allergic reaction rather than a poison and people’s tolerance for it changes over the years. The opposite is also true, for example my brother is allergic to mowed grass now, decades ago he wasn’t.

Eating poison ivy thinking you might gain tolerance to it is a really, really bad idea in my opinion. I suspect someone as badly allergic as I used to be might die from that. A really bad idea.

I doubt that poison ivy honey exists, thankfully so. You would have to live in some sort of hellscape for poison ivy flowers to be numerous enough to make the necessary percentage to call it a poison ivy monoculture honey. Here we have black locust honey because there are millions of black locust trees and honeybees love the flowers. Still the honey can’t be processed and all mixed up, the beekeeper has to know which section of comb was made while the trees were in flower and keep it separate from the rest in the same hive.

The idea of poison ivy honey if it does exist in my opinion is stupid, and it’s best in all situations, not to eat poison ivy.

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Now that you mention it, I can easily imagine monofloral honeys requiring a lot of careful organization and record-keeping on the part of the beekeeper!

I wonder if eating poison ivy honey might be helpful to a person with severe poison ivy allergies? Eating local honey made from the pollen of whatever’s-making-hay-fever-act-up-this-year tends to be helpful to people with hay fever.

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I wonder if eating poison ivy honey might be helpful to a person with severe poison ivy allergies?

I think it wouldn’t because poison ivy allergy tends to be a sensitivity to the urushiol oil on the leaves (like mangoes!), not the pollen. It’s unlikely poison ivy pollen contains this oil, so consuming honey with poison ivy pollen probably wouldn’t help.

That said, if someone is allergic to the pollen, maybe eating it helps? :woman_shrugging: I should really look into the empirical evidence for honey helping with pollen allergies! Sounds like a fun rabbit-hole :sweat_smile:

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I doubt that poison ivy honey exists, thankfully so. You would have to live in some sort of hellscape for poison ivy flowers to be numerous enough to make the necessary percentage to call it a poison ivy monoculture honey.

I don’t know why the beekeepers thought their honey was poison ivy honey (and maybe it’s unlikely it was a true monofloral honey, but maybe poison-ivy dominant; the beekeepers seemed afraid to admit they found poison ivy nectar to consistently win in honey tasting competitions, it was shared in hushed tones and without a lot of follow-up details), but poison ivy does make up a fairly significant portion of the understory in the parts of Appalachia where I lived; it even out-competes Japanese knotweed.

Either way, it’s just chatter I overheard, so it’s fair to take it with a grain of salt!

and just to add to the concerns about eating poison ivy, climate change is altering the potency and reactions to poison ivy, making it more allergic.

The poison ivy of the 1970s is not the same as the poison ivy of today, checkout this study from 2006:

In this 6-year study at the Duke University Free-Air CO2 Enrichment experiment, we show that elevated atmospheric CO2 in an intact forest ecosystem increases photosynthesis, water use efficiency, growth, and population biomass of poison ivy. The CO2 growth stimulation exceeds that of most other woody species. Furthermore, high-CO2 plants produce a more allergenic form of urushiol. Our results indicate that Toxicodendron taxa will become more abundant and more “toxic” in the future, potentially affecting global forest dynamics and human health.

For what it’s worth, my partner is extremely allergic and also gets rashes “just from looking at it”, but they also saw a significant reduction in sensitivity when they joined me in eating poison ivy. Still, I’m not endorsing or encouraging it for others, especially because different people can have very different reactions. One of the studies that explored this found that some study participants had side effects, including pruritus ani (which I did experience when I ate too much). Also when I would eat too much, sometimes I would become extra sensitive to urushiol for a short period, and little and short-lived rashes would break out on my fingers and my toes would itch.

It would be nice for forestry workers if they developed a protocol for extracting pure urushiol and then made shots for gradually increasing immunity, as I think this would avoid some of the risks of eating the plant (which hasn’t really been tested for safety). Subcutaneous injections would probably eliminate some of the side effects that come from oral consumption, like the pruritus ani.

I think the project was abandoned because the potential for negative side effects across larger populations was too great, making it hard to develop a commercial product. But someone could probably figure it out, and it would absolutely save lives.

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I don’t know how you would make poison ivy honey. Poison ivy is very common; it grows almost anywhere here, if bees like it then a little poison ivy is in all local honey anyway. To actually make it and know for sure I think you would need a lot of poison ivy and track its location in the comb. I’ve very rarely seen flowers on the ubiquitous small plants.

If you have a big one though with a trunk the size of a teacup and running thirty feet up a tree, those things flower and make berries like crazy. If you had an acre of those with a hive nearby you might make poison ivy honey. I might wave as I drive by with my windows closed tight but won’t be stopping to say hello and thanks but no thanks on sampling your honey.