Take it from our grand-daughter. Don’t pick the hemlock flowers.

A couple of weeks ago, Karter’s bouquet caused painful blisters. She picked wildflowers on an outing with her mom and friends down by the river. All the grandkids always love to pick flowers when they come over here, too. But from now on, they know not to pick the hemlock flowers. I told them just to not pick any white flowers at all, just to be sure.

If you have never seen what poison hemlock or water hemlock sap can do to a person’s skin, it’s a good thing to know.

If you don’t know what these plants look like, that, too is a good thing to learn. Here’s one of the large poison hemlock flowers. I posted about this a couple of months ago.

There’s another, smaller, variety of hemlock (Cicuta maculata) that goes by the common name “water hemlock”. It looks similar to Queen Anne’s lace and often grows side by side with it. That’s the one Karter picked when she was picking the QAL down by King’s river.

The sap causes terrible blisters and sunlight magnifies the effect.

This is a pic of the smallest blister Karter had.

When the blister on her arm leaked fluid, it left a burn mark all the way down her forearm. My daughter didn’t know Karter had picked them, and didn’t realize every minute longer in the sun that day was making the situation worse.

By the time she broke out in the blisters, it was too late to just wash off the poison. Her babysitter put baking soda on the blisters when they sprang up the first day, and when Karter came to stay with me for the night, she said that helped it feel a lot better.

She stayed with me the next day and I kept her plastered with clay. It was mixed with goldenseal tincture and more baking soda. Karter said it was cold when I put it on there and that it felt nice.

The clay helped to keep any of the oozing fluid from draining on adjacent skin. Here’s a pic of sweet little Karter wearing mud on her face.

I don’t know if the clay did much to help, but it did make it feel better and I don’t want another opportunity to compare not using it. The blisters are dried up and her face thankfully never got blisters, just burns. It doesn’t look like it’ll scar. The burn on her arm might, though. Maybe her fingers too.