If you are not sure what poison ivy looks like, take a look in my poison ivy set from time to time and remind your teacher friends to do the same. Remember that in the Fall, when the leaves are beginning to turn colours, They can be just about any colour other than green! A common caution along trails in the Ottawa River Valley. The following two colorful images were of Poison Ivy climbing a fence by a parking lot in Connecticut. Essex, Connecticut. There are some plants in the forest that can look like Poison Ivy at various stages of their growth and development.
One of these is Virginia Creeper, but its normal leaf pattern is quite different as can be readily seen in this photo of the Virginia Creeper taken in the Fall. Other three-leaved plants, seen in the early Spring that might be confused with Poison Ivy and often occupy a similar ecosystem niche, are the various Trillium species.
The trillium flower starts out as a beautiful white flower and turns to pink as it ages. Note, however, that, in the following picture, taken by the Hearts Desire Weir on the lower Jock River in Ottawa, the shiny green leaves at the base of the trillium belong to the dreaded three leaved plant: Poison Ivy.
While the flowers of the Trillium species are large and showy and might lure you off of the trail to admire them more closely, the flower of the Poison Ivy plant is much smaller and basically nondescript.
Cropped from the above Trillium posting. Since I am rather allergic to poison ivy, one of my fears in the Springtime is that I, or the feet of my tripod, will end up in an emerging patch of poison ivy before the leaves unfurl and show off their shiny green.
