Way back in the mists of time, i.e. fifteen years ago, wild parsnip was an interesting rarity along the edges of my lane - a tallish plant, blooming  like a yellow version of Queen Anne’s lace, but not pretty enough to make me want to pick it.  Thank god for that. 

Wild parsnip is a sort of biennial, in that most of the plants take two years to get to a point where they can bloom with enthusiasm.  So we get even-numbered years to forget about it, and then it bursts forth in the odd ones, although some of it is around all the time.   Two summers ago, in Vermont, wild parsnip went over the tipping point from regular old weed to virulent pest.  It was everywhere.  This meant that people unfamiliar with it (most of us) went bumbling around in it as they went about their normal outdoor pastimes.  The guy at my village gas station showed me the results of mowing his overgrown back yard.  The visitation on his hands made poison ivy look like a minor case of loofah burn.  It was hideous, oozing-sores hideous – the kind you want to back away from, but don’t, because that would be rude.  Anyway, I was riveted by his story, because it was the first time I had heard that wild parsnip was such a menace. 

I gave the flowers a wide berth after that, and was further encouraged to avoid the plants when my neighbors, Bob and Becky, had a bad run-in  last year, from which they have not yet fully recovered.  But I didn't really notice too many in my own field, which is has turned from hay grass to densely packed goldenrod.  

Just a few weeks ago, I was looking for weeds for Becky and Bob's chickens, and I kept eyeing some particularly succulent sheaves of leaves along our paths.   The only thing that kept me from grabbing up big handfuls was the nagging thought that it might possibly be wild parsnip, which until then, I could only identify after it had flowered.  So it is only by the grace of fate that I am not currently leaking plasma all over my keyboard.  For  when it started to bloom,  I could see it was indeed the awful pastinaca sativa.

Wild parsnip is horribly toxic, in a most diabolical way.  A chemical in its juices  makes the skin extra extra-sensitive to sunlight, causing it to burn and bubble into blisters.  Phytophotodermatitis is the official term. There are many unofficial ones.  

Right now there’s a sea of cheerful yellow wild parsnip flowers bobbing at a height of three to six feet all across the fields and byways from Dogpatch  into the next villages, in all directions.  They line the roadsides in wait for unwary travelers, and woe unto anyone who changes a tire amid them, or stops a bike to admire the pretty “dill.”

Okay, so pastinaca sativa has yet to learn to walk.  But I'm not about to wait around and see if that happens.  The one thing I have accomplished this summer is a ruthless decapitation of every single wild parsnip I see, at least while on foot (driving to the village I just avert my eyes).  There is an invading battalion just below the brow of my hill on the eastern edge of the goldenrod, and it seems intent on moving west.  As of yesterday evening, I had taken down 734 adults.  I wade out into seas of deep grass and tangled bedstraw to reach the monsters.  They are still not very bright, and can be seen looming above everything else from far away.  In the monsoon-fueled goldenrod sections, the wild parsnip grows a couple of feet above the top of the four-foot high canopy.  They do not bother to hide, perhaps because they have become aware of their toxic powers.

To take down the devils, I go out wearing long pants and boots, and a long-sleeved shirt.  My glasses serve as goggles.  I grip my clippers in my left hand, even though I am right-handed.  My right hand must grasp my bamboo ski pole, which is used to keep me from falling face-first into patches of parsnip, and to fend off the monsters as they topple to the ground.  Actually, most of them don’t topple, being held upright by surrounding vegetation. Here the ski pole is useful for tossing the corpses aside to get at the next bunch. In spite of my care,  a few microscopic dots of parsnip blood must have gotten on my left arm the other day, for I had a small blister later, which is now a cratered scab surrounded by five other dots of crust. 

What is really disturbing, though, is that I just cut down a dozen huge plants that were lurking between the garden and the hedgerow right next to the house.  I pass that spot multiple times a day.  I have been hunting the parsnip for weeks.  I had never seen them, and yet, there they were,  some of them nearly seven feet high, with stalks thicker than my thumb.

And I just found a new thick stand of parsnip rising out of a nearly impenetrable patch of goldenrod, on the other side of the garden.  Clippers and a ski pole are just not cutting it, so to speak.  A flame thrower and a tank would be better, because I have a feeling the wild parsnip is starting to stalk me.  

I know it hates me.

Seriously, people - do not tangle with this stuff before reading up about it.  It may not be able to walk  and suck your organs dry yet, but it can cause grievous bodily harm.  Not kidding. Look at those links.