00:00Hello, I'm Dave the Plant Man and I do wildflowers and gardening tips on social media.
00:06I've got half a million followers across Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and I do a lot of
00:12country walks. Now this plant here is called Common Ogweed. Now it's not totally safe to touch
00:20but this isn't the really bad one. I want to show you next the Giant Ogweed. That is super dangerous.
00:25Right, this is the dreaded Giant Ogweed. Now you can see it's got a lot more bigger pointed leaf
00:34and it has these spots on the stem and the seed heads at the top. It's three, four times bigger
00:40than the Common Ogweed. Now this is the one, if you crash through this and got it on your skin,
00:46got the sap off this on your skin, the sap actually reacts with sunshine. It's a phototoxic sap so what
00:54you get is a big blister. Now if you get enough of it on you, I've heard of people streaming
00:59and finding little ones in the ground and getting covered, splattered with the sap
01:04in sunshine. I heard one about a little girl who rode through a biking through some little ones,
01:10some young ones, fell off, got covered in blisters. She had third degree burns. She was in hospital,
01:19I think it was two months, while they treated the burns and then after that she couldn't go on summer
01:25holidays in the sunshine for another two or three years. So this is a seriously bad weed.
01:32So if you see these anywhere, I've heard stories about people trying to, kids using them as pea
01:37shooters and burning their lips. Also if you ever see the, if you ever break down on the motorway,
01:44watch out for these quite often on the banking and central reservation on the motorway. And if you
01:50climb over the fence and again crush through all these with, with bird skin and then get it in the
01:55sunshine, it'll come up as blisters. Now if you ever did get the sap on your skin, what you do is cover
02:01it up, put a jacket on, make yourself safe, get it out to the sun. It doesn't burn unless it's mixed with
02:07sunshine. So cover it up with a, with a, with a sweater or something, get to some water and wash
02:14it off straight away and you should be all right. So that's all you have to do. Make sure you don't
02:19mix the sap of this with sunshine if you do get it on your, on your skin. But the safest thing is keep
02:26away from it. Don't even try and chop it down. Right, this is in the middle of a field so it's fairly
02:31safe. You'd have to be mental like me to come through here. But there's these going down the side
02:37of the canal bank, right next to the water. So again, that's where they're dangerous. If you do
02:42find them against the canal bank, contact the Canal and Rivers Trust. Try and get a pinpoint where
02:49they are on a map with your phone. Tell them exactly where it is and they will get a contractor to come
02:54out and deal with it and they will remove it. So if you find these growing anywhere, like next to a
03:00river, a public place or a towpath and you know it's going to be a danger in the future, please report it
03:07and let's get them in the fields out here where they're not going to do a lot of damage.
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