Remember that bad sunburn I mentioned in my last post? It turns out that it wasn’t entirely a lapse in my judgement. I still should have been wearing sunscreen and probably a hat and all the sun protection things because we were in the sun. But when I left for my adventures in Buffalo on Saturday, I was mostly thinking about rain protection. I had an umbrella and a poncho. Being prepared doesn’t get you far if you are prepared for the wrong thing.
I was going to Buffalo to hang out with some old friends that I don’t see often. We were going to do the art and ecology tour at Silo City. This place was my kind of place. They are using this huge old grain silo and other buildings that are part of this old abandoned industrustrial area to faciliate art projects and improve the ecology of the area which is overrun with invasive plants, because invasive plants can survive in inhospitable environtments, like abandoned industrial areas. I don’t think I’ve ever seen more Japanese knotweed in one place in my life. They’re also working on converting one of the old office buildings into affordable housing.
I am really excited about the idea of using art as a tool to reshape the ecology of an area. Almost all the art projects were plant based and one was a fancy bee hive. That had to be fixed a bit because the architechure students maybe forgot about the bee’s needs in the face of making something that looked really cool. Another big project was this labyrinth of all native pollinator plants. And the place has it’s own little native plant nursury with a couple of high tunnels and they repurposed even more old industrial infrastructure into a sort of aquaponics setup for getting native water plants started.
Not all of the art pieces used all native plants. There was a big earthwork called “AGAIN — AN INTO THE WEEDS PROJECT” that used repurposed concrete slabs and soil and featured plants that have been historically used for women’s reproductive health (I think).
From the booklet “all plants in this earthwork are capable of powerful interactions with the human body.”
This is definitely true of rue (Ruta graveolens) but I wouldn’t know how true for a few more days.
By end of that day I could feel that I had gotten too much sun. The skin on my forehead was burning even before I started driving home from Buffalo. When I crawled into bed put my sleep-phones (a headband with earphones) on it was painful. It was not as bad as my worst face sunburn ever but still right up there in the top 10, which was a little confusing. I did spend a lot of time outside, and it was sunny, but it wasn’t more exposure than I had gotten on any other weekend this summer.
When I looked in the mirror on Sunday morning it was a really odd sunburn, like I had put sunscreen on most of my face but neglected a huge “M” shaped patch on my forehead. Puzzling.
The next afternoon my folks were doing Monarch banding with my aunt and uncle and some cousins and I joined in, being careful to wear hat, which hurt a lot because of the burn. Meanwhile my arms were not covered.
The day after that I noticed a weird blister on my wrist and I suddenly thought, I wonder if I touched something at the Silo City Tour and then touched my face. And then, “What was that plant that they crushed and handed around to smell at the earthwork sculpture?” It was rue.
So I started googling rue and sun exposure and went down a rabbit hole reading about rue and other plants that cause phytophototoxic burn injuries. And it really seemed to fit well with my weird sunburn and the blister on my arm.
Phytophototoxic burn injuries
Some plants have chemicals that, when they contact your skin and then are exposed to UV light, cause burning and blisters, which is officially called phytophotodermatitis (plant-light-skin-itis).
Maybe you’ve heard of giant hogweed, which can MESS YOU UP—stay the f#$% away from that stuff.
We’ve had wild parsnip show up on our property along the road every year at some point and it has simliar properties, properties that I was aware of so I have learned to recognize it and remove it carefully.
Both of those have furanocoumarins which is what causes the phytophotodermatitis. Rue has them too.
I did not know that rue had phototoxic chemistry. I wasn’t particularly familiar with rue at all. But in searching I found several articles about severe burns where rue was the cause, one involved someone rubbing themselves all over with rue for luck and then getting in a tanning bed and being rewarded with second degree burns that took months to heal with medical intervension. (Warning: There are some pretty unpleasant pictures via that link.)
According to this article, A Phytophototoxic Injury at a Burns Unit: The Ungraceful After-Effects of the "Common Rue" Plant, I should have avoided the sun for a minimum of 48 hours after. If only I had known before the monach tagging. I did cover my head but I didn’t even realize I had two spots on my wrist and hand. One of those spots turned into a juicy blister the size of an M&M.
After seeing those two pub-med articles I’m feeling like I got off easy. Even though I just had just a few leaves in my hand, I did crush them a couple of times so I could see what they smelled like and then my hair kept getting in my face because it was windy so I was dragging my phytophototoxic chemical covered hand across my face over and over.
I’m still not going outdoors without my forehead covered just to be on the safe side. I used it as an excuse to buy yet another buff band.
I did follow up with the folks at the tour to let them know this plant had more to offer than interesting smells. It’s possible that I’m just super sensitive and not everyone has the same level of reaction to these chemicals. This is my first encounter with them so I’ll probably be extra EXTRA careful with anything similar in the future. I wonder if there is a “Field Guide to Plants not to Rub on Your Face” or if I need to add this to my list of project ideas I’ll never get around to.
My worst ever sunburn
(Stop now if you don’t enjoy gross-out stories.)
I thought I woud be able to find a picture of this sunburn quickly. I swear I scanned it at some point but now I can’t find it so you’ll have to use your imagination. When I was 14, I spend a day at the beach in Florida with no sunscreen on my face. I guess I forgot? There are plenty of things where I’d like my pre-adult self to explain WTF they were thinking, but they don’t exist anymore so we can never really know.
My entire face was one big blister. It was horrifying. We went about our vacation and people stared at me everywhere we went. I don’t remember feeling like I wanted to hide it but that was probably because that just wasn’t an option. It was like I had a mask on that I couldn’t take off.
And if I managed to fall asleep on my side all the blister liquid would slowly run to one side of my face and the other side would crust up. And when I rolled over the process would repeat in the other direction. I had to carry a hankerchief around and my mom would say “you’re dripping” and I’d mop up the ooze.
It was awful but it healed eventually.
I’ve been waiting for the skin cancer shoe to drop ever since. I do have some pre-cancerous cells on my face at this point that I’ve had treated a few times.