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Poisonous Plants, Purple Paint, and Pot S TA R I A VA N D E R P O O L MY INTEREST IN plant taxonomy was strongly developed from the fifth grade on, so I had done a lot of field work with plants while I was in high school, and I started college as a major in botany. I had spent years trying to convince my mother that I was not going to poison the family by keeping the refrigerator full of native plants—an assertion reinforced by the fact that no family member had ever shown any signs of toxicity. When I realized that I was going to be isolated on a college campus, restricted to a shared dorm room, and cut off from contact with native plants, I decided to transplant some of my favorite plants to my dorm room. We had great light, and I was rooming with another biology major, so it was feasible. I established native mint and other wetland plants that thrived in the dorm room. In addition I also transplanted dwarf crested iris, wild violet, and other early spring woodland flowers to the dorm room. My biological reasoning was sound—these were all herbaceous perennials that could survive in reduced light. My roommate and I enjoyed the patch of native wildflowers that I had established in our room during our freshman year. However, my roommate had developed a persistent skin rash that the campus health center nurse treated with topical creams and other remedies . My roommate was tested for ectoparasites as well as stress-related causes. Her rash would clear up, but would always reappear. It wasn’t severe enough to justify seeing a specialist, so she spent the year applying Calamine lotion and other ointments. Everyone was baffled by her skin rash and its failure to respond to treatment. 1 During our sophomore year I moved to another dorm, taking my transplanted garden with me. My former roommate’s skin rash cleared up during her sophomore year, and they concluded it must have been stressinduced . It was only years later, when I took a graduate course in plant metabolites, that I learned that many people have an allergic reaction to Iris that presents as a rash. I’ve never had the courage to track down my friend and confess that I suspect that my native plant garden probably had been the cause of her rash all those years ago. A sufficiently large percentage of the population is allergic to poison ivy for the effect of contact with the oils from that plant to be well established . Other plants, such as monkshood or castor bean, are well-known poisonous plants. What is less well known is that people can have an idiosyncratic allergic reaction to any of the many different types of secondary compounds that plants produce. In fact, many botanists and physicians don’t realize this. Call it cosmic vengeance or roommate’s revenge if you want, but I had my own, much itchier, encounter with innocuous-seeming plants years later. This time I knew enough to realize my mistake minutes after I made it and anticipate potential outcomes for a full forty-eight hours before suffering the consequences. When you’ve worked in “the field” in Arkansas for years, you learn to recognize and avoid poison ivy, copperheads, cottonmouths, and rattlesnakes automatically. Over the years, as a professional biologist, I’ve learned to acknowledge that snakes play a valuable role in the community —but they still get my attention when I stumble, run, or step across one of them. On the other hand, poison ivy is one of the predominate plants in many of the areas where I work, especially in the bottomland hardwood areas I’ve been working in recently. Since I’m relatively insensitive to poison ivy, I am casual about walking through it or being around it. In fact, there are several poison ivy plants that I have successfully ignored for years in the hedges around my native plant gardens at home. However, take a field botanist out of his or her local field, combine that with an insatiable curiosity about plants and a certain level of confidence , and the stage is set for a learning experience. My graduate student Linh Hoang and I were working on an investigation of the population genetics of Riddell’s goldenrod. For the genetics research we needed representative specimens from throughout the range of the species. Since the range of Riddell...

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