Wild Parsnips ~ Satan's Hellfire

Let me tell you a little story about a botanical nightmare. A plant so nasty that it certainly must be rooted in the depths of Hades. This foul plant has deceitful sunshiny yellow flowers and kind of giant parsley looking stalk and can grow over your head. We asked neighbors if they knew what it was. They didn't know. Family did not know either. So we didn't worry about it.

You brush against it without a care. At least I did while moving fence for the horses. It started out small, the plants, the satanic blooms from the spiritual realm of evil and suffering. Sure we mowed it a few times, but then my mower man (husband) left for a few weeks for work. It starts to grow and grow and GROW. From my waist to over my head it grew. I had to stomp it down to get the posts and electric fence moved.

Well hells bells, if I didn't get a nasty poison ivy looking rash from my knees down. Thinking it was poison ivy I used poison ivy medicine on it. And it BURNED like Beelzebub, himself took a leak on my legs! I had tears in my eyes, people! And the sun, let me tell you about the sun hitting the blister spots. It felt like acid tipped pungi sticks were being applied to my skin. Mowing the lawn was like taking mini hellfires to the legs. But day after day I continued to go move the horse fence.

The sun torture is what made me google other poisonous plants. I've had poison ivy, but this was bad. Instead of clear filled blisters, I was actually getting huge pus filled sores. I googled weeds with little yellow flowers, and the results came up mustards and buttercups. None of the pictures were what I was looking for. Finally I google "yellow wild carrots", as the flowers looked like them but were yellow. BING! BING! BING! Wild parsnips. And we had a field full of it. Lucifer came and spread his seed (insert snickering)! The rat beep. And now I have the scars to prove it.

From Wild Parsnip (Pastinaca sativa), the bastard brother of cultivated parsnip. Wild parsnip contains chemicals in the sap that can cause an intense, localized burn – actually, a sunburn. There are chemicals in wild parsnip called psoralens that cause "phytophotodermatitis." That means an inflammation of the skin induced by a plant with the help of sunlight. When absorbed by skin, the plant juices are energized by ultraviolet light. The process destroys cells and skin tissue, though the reaction takes time to produce visible damage. Blisters appear a day or two after sun exposure. Soon after blisters rupture and the skin begins to heal. One of wild parsnip's "signature" effects is a dark red or brownish discoloration of the skin in the area where the burn occurred. This hyper-pigmentation can persist in the skin for as long as two years, and usually leaves scarring.

Unfortunately, there is no treatment for wild parsnip burns. Just keeping it washed with cool water helped me the most. The bad part of it all is being outside in the sun. It is no joke.

And now for the gruesome pictures! (Not mine, of course. Haha!)

The flower:

So for heaven's sake, if you come across this devil weed, run away! Well I guess you can eat the roots. But what dingbat would want to do that?