All I can say is that I’m envious. Having lived in Rhode Island most of my life, I’ve had numerous ER visits for poison ivy. There were times when the open sores and fluid on my arms were mistaken for burns. A steroid treatment always cleared it up for me in about two days. I’ve been all clear so far in Florida! :)
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IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO TELL WILD CARROT AND POISON HEMLOCK APART
I can easily tell the two apart, and our ancestors must have been able to do this too, because we have domestic carrots.
And fine, so this isn’t about a plant, but
THERE ARE NO TOXIC MUSHROOMS THAT GROW ON TREES
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Aw man, that’s what my uncle gets and I hear they are very painful. Good thing the steroids worked, my brother had a bad reaction with those.
For some people that may be true. I know someone who says that it is impossible to reshelve a book in the same place that it came from.
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Jack o’ lantern mushrooms usually grow on trees, and you don’t want to eat one of those either! I know of people who get chanterelles and jack o’lanterns confused, which I find mind blowing.
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I’ve got two plant myths common in my corner of the world, for some reason both of them I’ve heard from tourist guides, and in quite remote natural settings:
One of them came out when a tour guide was explaining some bewildered tourists in a trail deep in the rainforest, when he spotted an epiphytic anthurium. He said that it was an epiphytic plant ( 
), which means that it grows on trees ( ) to suck out their nutrients and harm them ( 
). This myth is indeed a common one, and orchid fanciers sometimes take it as an excuse to collect wild orchids and bromeliads…
The second one was from another tourist guide guiding his crew (more tourists, many not very interested in Mayan plants) in Isla Contoy, an immensely beautiful island in the Northern Mexican Caribbean. He was telling his crew about the Mayan legend of chaká and chechem, two brothers, a good one and an evil one, that were after the same girl. When they died, they turned into trees. The good one, turned into a chaká, the medicinal gumbo-limbo tree (Bursera simaruba), and the evil one, into a venomous chechem, the black poisonwood (Metopium brownei), a relative of the poison ivy. Both trees are dominant, very ecologically important species in the woods of this corner of the world and have significant places in Mayan culture. And, according to the legend, both trees always grow together, and this is when the myth comes out. Most locals believe this myth as true (often discarding the rest of the legend), and it is so dogmatically inserted in their souls that they prefer to assume other things based on nothing than to realize that it is just a myth. For example, our guide in Contoy, having a chaká tree in front of him but no chechem, said that all the chechems on the island were cut off. Although chechems are very common at the nearby contiental coast, it would be irrational to cut them off, since they do not even harm tourists and the act would be ecocidal. And, the National Park’s Management Program says that a few native plants were planted around the visitor’s area, including a few chakás, so probably the tree pointed out by the guide was not even wild at all.
Later that day he also said that sea grapes are so sour that they will burn your mouth, something I have not experienced when eating them. Their taste is not even sour to me (at least just a bit).
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That just sounds like a triumph of wishful thinking. They don’t look at all alike, except for a similar color.
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Whereas in the Dominican Republic, locals just call them uvas (grapes) and make homebrew wine from them.
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Exactly!
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