<![CDATA[Pretty poison, differently grown and differently hued]]>

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In the last post you saw some poison ivy, Toxicodendron radicans, growing as a lush vine on a tree trunk. This protean plant also has the potential to develop into a forb, and that’s the form you’re seeing a bunch of here. These poison ivy plants were especially colorful, with leaves going well beyond yellow and turning conspicuously red.

Today’s photograph comes from Great Northern Blvd.* on a cold and windy December 6th. I willingly put up with the bad weather for a chance to photograph poison ivy looking more colorful than I’d seen it in years. Sweet are the uses of adversity, no?

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* Work has just begun on the addition of a fourth (and first tolled) lane in each direction on the expressway called Mopac. From what I’ve read in the newspaper, a tall sound-deflecting wall is to be built, and that will almost certainly mean the destruction of all the native plants I’ve been photographing for several years now in the no-man’s-land (or better yet this-man’s-land) between Great Northern Blvd. and the railroad tracks running alongside Mopac (whose name comes from the Missouri Pacific Railroad). If you’d like to look back and see some of the photographs I’ve taken there in the last couple of years, you can. I don’t know how many more there will be.

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