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STEVE GREENSPAN, SCOURGE OF POISON IVY
By Joanne Pilgrim
 Joanne Pilgrim
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(05/31/2007) Steve Greenspan is a horticulturist with a mission, and it’s as easy to spot as his bright yellow car. The PT Cruiser is covered with laser photos of poison ivy, and as he pulls up to a job the soundtrack is, unsurprisingly, the Coasters’ song “Poison Ivy.”
Red lettering on the car promises help for those, who, once covered with oozing itching blisters are afraid to venture again out into the yard. “Poison Ivy Removal.com,” it says, and “1-888-P.I. RELIEF.”
“Poison ivy is an opportunistic species,” Mr. Greenspan said. “It will choke out anything in its path to sustain or establish itself for air, light, and water.” He has been in the business of battling it for 32 years, and said that “this year is the worst I have ever seen.”
The effects of global warming — the buildup of greenhouse gases, rising temperatures, and preventing yearly dieback of plants — are giving not only poison ivy, poison oak, and poison sumac, but myriad invasive, nonnative plants a boost, he said. “As much as they were proliferating before, it’s exponentially worse,” he said. “All plants are growing more lush.”
Not only that, but the poison ivy has “more seeds, and the sap is more virulent.”
Mr. Greenspan, whose company is based in Huntington but who works often on the East End, defines his primary enemy as “the cockroach of the plant world.”
“Wherever you look, it stares back,” he says. And, trickily, it has many faces. It can grow as a bush, or a thick vine winding up trees. Leaves on a single plant can be shiny, or not, and notched, or not, and look deceptively similar to those on other vining plants they grow alongside. They are different colors in fall, winter, and spring.
Mr. Greenspan had a bad bout of poison ivy as a young camp counselor, when the pink calamine lotion he was swathed in caused almost as much pain and angst to the teenage boy.
He studied environmental science, horticulture, and landscape architecture in college and became a landscaper, but when the gardening season wound down in the heat of August he decided to offer to tackle poison ivy for his clients. “I put out a sign and I had business. The rest is history.”
“Now 30 years later I’m the authority on poison ivy,” fielding daily calls from around the country, he said, including from doctors seeking to better understand the scourge, and with clients “from the rich and famous to Kokomo Joe.”
A member of the Weed Science Society of America and other professional groups, he speaks knowledgeably not only about how his team of workers (nicknamed “goats” for the animals that actually eat poison ivy) eradicates the plants, but also about the plant’s characteristics, the body’s physiological response to its oils, and treatment of the rash they cause.
“Identification is really the key to avoidance,” he said. The company offers a wallet-sized card depicting poison oak, ivy, and sumac leaves to anyone who gives a call.
Almost everyone is susceptible to an allergic reaction from contact with the plants, and the more exposures you have, the more likely it will occur.
The cause is the urushiol oil, a resin, actually, that is found in every part of the plants except their flowers. It is present even in winter, and its molecules “grip the skin,” Mr. Greenspan explained, and pass through the skin-blood barrier, which is why those troublesome bubbles break out in places on the body other than those that have come in contact with the plant. His solution: Wash with cold water and strong detergent soap within 15 minutes, before it hits the bloodstream.
Just a drop of urushiol can cause the immune system reaction. Mr. Greenspan wonders about the potential for medical advances if that power could be harnessed.
Once his team is dispatched to a poison ivy patch, the company guarantees total eradication. But, to ensure that a new patch won’t root from newly introduced seeds, it also offers an “extended warranty.” Poison ivy seeds — thousands on each mature plant — are easily windblown because they are “no bigger than sesame seeds” and grow in clusters like grapes, and can also be spread by chipmunks, who “eat them like candy,” Mr. Greenspan said.
The seeds can also lie dormant in the soil for years before sprouting, after a rainy season, for example.
Plants, including the roots, are removed by hand. Occasionally, for “real tough jobs” like “a solid acre of poison ivy,” chemical sprays are used.
“But even then the dead plants can contaminate you” for up to a year, Mr. Greenspan said. “If urushiol had been entombed with the pharaohs, it would still be volatile today.”
Poison ivy should never be burned, he warned, because the airborne urushiol can cause dangerous internal blistering if it is breathed in.
The removal teams wear “Tyvek suits and body armor, gloves, and protective creams,” he said. The cost of the company’s services starts at $200, which could pay for the annihilation of perhaps 200 square feet of “nominal poison ivy.” But, he said, “I’ve had six-figure jobs.”
“It’s an itch niche,” he said. But it’s not just the itchy scratchy plants Mr. Greenspan and his teams do battle with. They will square off against any of the invasive plants, such as bamboo, stinging nettle, Japanese knotweed, or kudzu, which, he said, has spread from southern climes to establish a Long Island beachhead and grows six inches a day.
Poison ivy is “ubiquitous, resourceful, and tenacious,” and bamboo, which finds ways around buried barriers thought to be an effective means of control, has, Mr. Greenspan said, “an innate consciousness.”
“We’re definitely losing the battle” of native plants versus invasives, he said. The tenacious newcomers have “no natural predators, and no effective means of control. Even if you eradicate this year’s crop, there’s still the seed pool.”