The Brookline resident is an accidental enthusiast with a very traditional poison ivy story: it started with an unintentional encounter and has turned into a long-term itch.
It began seven years ago when Sachs and Walter, his 12-year-old black Labrador, were walking in the woods so that Sachs could pursue his passion for nature photography. When he stumbled upon a perfect example of a three-leafed poison ivy plant, he bent down to snap a photo. That's when the Russian family walked up.
"They were very interested in what I was doing, because they had heard of poison ivy but didn't know what it looked like," he said.
A light bulb went off in his head. Sachs owns his own design company, where he creates websites for clients, and had been toying with the idea of creating his own site. When it occurred to him that not many people can identify poison ivy, he started the site and began selling posters and cards to help people spot it and avoid it.
Sachs was uniquely suited to the task because he had developed in childhood what he calls "a strong visual target" for picking poison ivy out of a crowd, "the way golfers are good at finding golf balls," he said. "Fifty years later, I can still spot it driving down the turnpike."
Glenn Adelson, a frequent field companion of Sachs and a former lecturer in biology and environmental science at Harvard, says that while Sachs is self-trained, his knowledge is top-shelf.
"He's become as good as anyone at being able to pick it out, especially distinguishing it from look-alikes," said Adelson, who will be an assistant professor of biology at Wellesley in the fall. "He never makes a mistake, and he notices very particularly the variation in the plants."
That ability has come in handy for the hundreds of people who have e-mailed Sachs garden photos asking "Is this it?"
Sachs says the traditional description of poison ivy, three shiny leaves with white berries, is inadequate to encompass the plant's variability.
