How Professionals Wrestle With One of the Worlds Scariest Plants
If you happened to be driving past Cootes Paradise Sanctuary in Hamilton, Ontario, on a particular mid-July day in 2016, you might have seen something that left you scratching your head: three figures in head-to-toe hazmat suits and safety goggles, two of them holding shovels and the other toting a human-sized object wrapped in garbage bags, all waiting to cross the four-lane road and get back to their parked truck.
“There were a whole bunch of cars coming by at the time,” recalls Nadia Cavallin, who led the team. “People were slowing down and looking at us with their mouths wide open.”
Despite appearances, Cavallin—the herbarium curator at the Royal Botanical Gardens, of which Cootes Paradise Sanctuary is a part—wasn’t the dangerous organism in this scenario. That honor goes to the thing in the garbage bags: a six-foot giant hogweed, or Heracleum mantegazzianum.
An invasive plant that can grow up to 14 feet tall, the sap of the giant hogweed can cause second-degree burns (thus the hazmat suits) and, potentially, blindness (thus the safety glasses). Plus, it’s sneaky, resembling a number of less harmful plants. By wrestling that specimen out of the ground and back to the lab, Cavallin and her colleagues were risking their skins to educate the public.
more
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/giant-hogweed-sap-burn-dangerous
And some music!
= new reply since forum marked as read
I was thinking Audrey II. 
