I will see your kudzu and raise you, for giant hogweed is worse. I’m just going to give you Cracked.com’s description of it:
Giant hogweed is not a plant you want hanging around in your backyard garden because, despite what its name may imply, it in no way makes your yard smell like delicious bacon. Also, it’s an invasive plant species, growing up to 20 feet tall, whose sap is basically herbology’s answer to mustard gas.
Apparently that whole “sap straight out of Satan’s anus” thing didn’t faze the European and North American gardeners of the 19th and 20th centuries, who decided to import giant hogweed from Asia as a “botanical curiosity” because it looks like what you’d get if you blasted Queen Anne’s lace with the radiation that created Godzilla. In no time flat, this kaiju-plant took over riverbanks, ditches, and roadsides, wrapping the native flora in an unrelenting choke hold. Its true terror, however, lay in what it can do to us non-plant-based life forms – its aforementioned sap has the mutant ability to cause phytophotodermatitis, an extreme sensitivity to sunlight.
That means if it gets on your skin and then gets exposed to UV rays (which is pretty much a given, seeing as how it tends to grow, um, outside), it causes severe burns, lesions, and blisters that leave you with fat, purpley-black scars.
The government of Ontario adds: Eye contact with the sap has been reported (in the media and by various web sites) to cause temporary or permanent blindness. However, evidence of permanent blindness linked to exposure to Giant hogweed cannot be substantiated by any existing research.
However, there are derivatives of a chemical in the leaves, roots, stems, flowers, and seeds of giant hogweed called furanocoumarin. These derivatives can get into the nuclei of cells lining the cavities and surfaces of blood vessels and organs, bond with the DNA in the nuclei, and cause the cells to die. So even if there is no proof that giant hogweed will blind you permanently, I wouldn’t take a chance.
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