“No, you can’t be ‘immune’ to poison ivy”- This is a long story, but as a small child I was telling a friend that poison ivy has no effect on me. Some bossy teenage boy butted into our conversation and told me that I was lying and that after a lot of exposures, I would break out in a rash. he said that because of this, no-one can be immune to poison ivy. Understandably, this annoyed me, so I did what any twelve year old would do and used the scientific method. Meaning I started just… identifying and then touching poison ivy. I did this for years, and never got a rash. Unfortunately, my sibling did if they touched something I had touched. Today, if any grows where I don’t want it, I’ll just pull it out and chuck it in the woods. My skin is never effected.
Identifying the ‘gender’ of a fruit- I see this a lot with watermelon and peppers, I guess people think that so many bumps or the level of sweetness of a fruit means that it is male or female, which I think is silly because fruit is basically a plant’s ‘uterus’ and is made to contain the plant’s seeds.
These are the only two I can think of now, let me know if any of you have heard any funny, untrue ‘facts’ about plants!
-miniscule, cryptic differences in plant populations should be used as justification to split common and widespread plant species into dozens of unidentifiable entities at the species level when tracking them at subspecies or variety offers the same benefit but no harm
-a good way to conserve more plants is splitting each plant species into a billion species that then inherently come up as rare and then we can declare everything endangered and somehow it’ll stop habitat loss rather than piss everyone off and cause us to lose protections entirely
No way! This is exactly the same thing as me, I always used to say and still say I’m not affected by poison ivy and I remember always being told it was wrong. I literally swung like tarzan on a poison ivy vine to prove them wrong Glad to know someone else has experienced this!
Uh, obviously its a female watermelon I can tell because it took me exactly two bites to finish and was slightly more crunchy than the last one I ate , duh.
That dandelions are wonderful, helpful plants that we should encourage to grow in the United States, where they aren’t native, don’t do much to help native pollinators, and can become invasive in sensitive areas (especially in subalpine and boreal areas). Ugh! They’ve become more of a symbol of a downtrodden, scrappy survivor than what they are: just a plant.
I was just like the two of you. Never got poison ivy despite lots of contact. True, right up to the time I got. I don’t know if it was because I turned 60 or not, but it happened right about that time. I don’t get it too bad, but I’m more cautious now. I’ve known several people who only started getting a reaction later in life.
Many years ago (1980’s) there was a belief around the local area that Aloe vera cured baldness. You just had to rub some of the sap on your head and your hair would magically grow back. It was total nonsense of course but many believed it.
My Mamaw (regionalism for grandmother) used to tell my cousin and me that Mock Strawberries were poisonous. Yeah, not really. Bland, but not harmful.
Cousin and I had been eating them for months with no ill effects. Personally, I think that she was just trying to get us to stop grazing right off of the plants because of the two family dogs.
Not sure if this actually a myth or not. I recall from the 70s claims were made that plants can respond to human emotion. Talking to plants was supposed to be beneficial to them as was playing classical music to them. Negative human emotions near plants on the other hand, caused them stress. A number of books were written on the subject. Prince (now King) Charles was a high profile advocate for the theory. I also remember reports of US armed forces in Vietnam hooking sensors to plants near their perimeter which would detect the approach of enemy troops by picking up their negative vibes. I am not sure if any stringent scientific analyses was performed to test these theories, and whether they were confirmed or debunked. There does not seem to be much discussion on this topic in the present time.
From around the same time I recall the “mellow yellow” craze. The theory here was that banana skins when sufficiently dried out, could be smoked to provide an hallucinogenic high. This one was a myth. Tests revealed you could get the same affect by smoking a bit of rolled up newsprint.
That assumes that plants have political preferences based on human socioeconomic theories. If I was a plant, I would mainly experience bad vibes at the approach of Agent Orange and napalm.
It would probably have been an alarm signal triggered by something large crashing through the leaves and branches, whether that be a US soldier, Vietcong soldier, ungulate, or tornado. This would have acted as an alarm that something with significant mass was crossing the perimeter, which would be useful even though the plants obviously would not take sides in the war.
I noticed something very interesting about English ivy while in England where i think it is native. There the ivy grows to within about 10 feet of the top of the tree but for whatever reason always seems to stop at that point, so doesn’t overtop the tree. I don’t know if it was a weird coincidence (i saw it multiple times) or if the trees there have some defense against it or the ivy some symbiosis so they don’t kill the host. But in North America it does not stop before the top of the tree, it overtops and kills trees. As do bittersweet and various other vines.
I once got told that having too many plants inside my bedroom could kill me because the CO2 from plant respiration would accumulate in the bedroom air during the night when they don’t photosynthesize…
My father (90) loves dietary supplements. He gets quite a lot of mail from mostly dubious companies concerning the pain-relieving properties of turmeric. Of course, he bought turmeric filled capsules and he took quite a lot of them. The turmeric did not reduce any pain (not in that doses), but it was indeed very digestive. We had to change his diapers and his clothes every 30min. He also got an awful bleeding nose, bleedings in his eyes and probably minor intestinal bleedings, because he has to take aspirin regularly and one should not combine high doses of turmeric and aspirin.
Glad to know someone else has experienced this!
, duh.
