POISON OAK, TOXICODENDRON DIVERSILOBUM
This stretch of the Old Conference Drive from its intersection with Mount Hermon Road and well into the woods holds some particularly fine patches of poison oak. In the Autumn the patches are ablaze with color, really the only time of year you can safely avoid P.O. since at other times of the year it either blends in to the greenery or looks like a patch of bare sticks! Those of us who get P.O. badly sometimes wonder, especially after two weeks of intense itching and blistering, what possible good this plant is?
OK, I know it’s difficult, but let’s try to be objective and look at the pros and cons.
Pros:
1. A good wall of P.O. will either keep trespassers off your land or put them in the hospital after they’ve trespassed.
2. In the Autumn P.O. is one of our most beautiful native plants.
3. It is drought resistant and forms shrubs as well as vines; and it can be grown in the shade or full sun, really the ideal landscape plant!
4. “Deer species and other animals predate on the leaves of the plant – which are rich in phosphorus, calcium and sulfur, while bird species utilize the plant structure for shelter (these animals do not seem to demonstrate any sort of reaction to urushiol).”
5. 20% of us will not get it, at least not at first. However, even these lucky few will become sensitized over time with repeated exposure to urushiol, the oil which causes the reaction.
6. It is the inspiration for one of our favorite childhood maxims: Leaves of three, let it be!”
Cons:
1. 80% of us will have a reaction to P.O. no matter what.
2. It causes contact dermatitis - it itches (pruritus), blisters, and burns.
3. It is the bane of cache-placers in the west. How many times have people found your best caches and instead of saying “Thanks for the great cache” and awarding you a favorite, they whine and cry, “Too much P.O.!” or “Didn’t even attempt this cache because of the P.O.!” And how many times have you placed a cache where you’d swear there was no P.O. only to have cachers tell you a year later that they could barely get to the cache because of all the P.O.?
4. It is sneaky; you don’t know you’re doomed to itch for two weeks until you start itching hours or even days after contact. At least a bee or wasp lets you know right away!
5. It’s not content to have you itch just once, no, it clings to your shoes and your clothing and your pets so that you’re guaranteed to have a continuous supply of urushiol handy!
However, whether you love P.O. or hate it you can’t deny that "In spring, the ivory flowers bloom on the sunny hill or in sheltered glade, in summer its fine green leaves contrast refreshingly with dried and tawny grassland, in autumn its colors flame more brilliantly than in any other native, but one great fault, its poisonous juice, nullifies its every other virtue and renders this beautiful shrub the most disparaged of all within our region." John Howell, Botanist.
HISTORY OF CONFERENCE DRIVE:
In the 1960s the main artery between Scotts Valley and Felton was Conference Drive which veered off of today’s Mount Hermon Road just north of the Heavenly Café (which back then was Little Gals Foster’s Freeze).
The road then more or less paralleled Bean Creek, passed through Mount Hermon Christian Conference Center and then dropped down into Felton.
The sand hills that surround Scotts Valley are considered to be one of the rarest habitats in the world, a fact now recognized which has resulted in the preservation of Quail Hollow, the Randy Morgan Preserve, and the Bonny Doon Ecological Preserve. But at one time these hills were mined heavily for their quality white sand, the same sand which holds an abundance of marine fossils from the Miocene.
Back in the mid 20th Century few regulations existed for extracting sand and as a result the local creeks became polluted with the silt from sand-washing, and many slopes suffered severe erosion from the removal of the delicate sandhills topsoil. One such area of erosion repeatedly occurred on a slope which crossed the old Conference Drive west of the cache.
The topsoil had been removed up slope and so when the heavy winter rains came the whole slope slid into Bean Creek damaging Conference Drive in the process.
This happened enough times to cause the county board of supervisors to decide to re-route the road in the early 1970s.
Unfortunately this re-route meant condemning a strip of land along the east side of Bean Creek so that the new Mount Hermon Road could be built. As a result many private parcels of land were threatened by eminent domain - and several houses previously located along an idyllic stretch of Zayante Creek would now have a towering bridge looming above their houses. Part of my own family’s property which my grandfather had bought in 1920 was one of those condemned.
So, the neighbors got together and tried to fight the road relocation saying that the old road kept sliding in because of the quarry and that the quarry owners (we won't name names ... ) should be responsible for its upkeep. We all ended up in a federal court in San Jose in which the judge who heard the case called the erosion an “Act of God” and gave the new road the go ahead.
So, the new road was built along with the Zayante Bridge - the county took two acres of land out of the center of our acreage, paid us $2000 and sold the extracted sand. Since then Conference Drive has been allowed to deteriorate although you can still walk or bicycle through to Felton this way. Those of you who drive the new road might wonder why such a fast road should end in Felton at a right angle turn. The initial plans called for the road to go straight across the horse pasture to Highway 9 and on into the San Lorenzo Valley, but the Feltonites fought this successfully in an effort to preserve the open space around town.