glumshoe:

Here are some reference photos for identifying poison ivy. It’s not as easy as people make it sound. Poison ivy looks different depending on the time of year, the leaves may be atypically shaped, and occasionally they may even have five leaves instead of three. That’s just the… beauty of nature, I guess.

Some tips:

• Leaves, especially young ones, may have reddish tints to them.
• The vines that grow on trees and other structures are often ‘hairy’ and have thousands of little roots anchoring to the surface of whatever they’re climbing. Dead plants may still cause allergic reactions.
• The stem on the central leaf may be slightly longer than the stems of the other two.
• Poison ivy is a shrub, so the stem is relatively inflexible and woody, as opposed to more flexible herbaceous stems (as on, say, dandelions).
• Sometimes the outer sides of the side leaves form notched/jagged “mitten” shapes…. but sometimes the leaves are all smooth.
• The “veining” in each leaf is not symmetrical – the lines extending from the center of the leaf will usually alternate and not match up on both sides.
• They also grow white/yellowish clusters of berries: