ENGLISH IVY–FOR BETTER OR WORSE
I am blessed and cursed with English Ivy, Hedera helix. Everyone knows what it looks like–a vining plant with dark green, glossy, three-lobed leaves. It can creep and climb, and is perfectly capable of reaching a height of over thirty feet. When the plants mature, they can develop trunks up to a foot in diameter, with leaves that lose their lobes and become roughly triangular. English ivy is marvelous because it suppresses weeds, covers bare ground, prevents erosion and saves work for the gardener. English ivy is terrible because it knows no boundaries; acts as a monoculture and suppresses plant diversity; damages some of the structures, both manmade and natural, that it climbs and generally behaves in a thuggish manner. Landscapers usually love it, ecologists frequently hate it, and most of the rest of us fall somewhere in between.
English ivy is not native to these shores, and probably arrived with early colonists. Like some of them, it has succeeded here, and today you can find it in window boxes, containers, topiary and even grown indoors. Unfortunately it has also spread into woodlands and other natural areas, outcompeting less hardy native plants.
When I moved into my current house eight years ago, there was very little garden, but there were two big ivy-covered areas, one in the front and one in the back. In the back the ivy grows in the shade, in an area about three feet by ten feet. The front patch is probably four by fifteen and gets a fair amount of sun. In both places it is a job to keep the ivy within bounds. On the other hand, the ivy has kept the weeds down, giving me more time to go after the crabgrass and chickweed that threaten to dominate the rest of the garden.
Now though, much of the rest of the garden is full of plants, and I look covetously on the ivy-covered areas. I have planted some specimens in the patches already, removing enough ivy to dig planting holes and give the new plants some breathing room. In the shady back garden, the ivy is interrupted by a couple of young rhododendrons, an oak-leaf hydrangea and an increasing number of hostas. My aim is to make hosta the new ground cover, interspersing them with hellebores and clumps of spring-flowering bulbs.
In the front, I have planted a butterfly bush, a flame azalea, a couple of roses and some miscellaneous perennials amid the ivy. Keeping the ivy from creeping up and strangling those plants requires the kind of constant vigilance that should only be reserved for matters of homeland security. It’s time for the front ivy to go as well.
How do you get rid of English ivy? Repeated applications of glycophosphate, most commonly sold as Roundup â„¢, will do the trick, but I don’t like to use herbicides–especially when prized plants are growing nearby. It can also be removed by hand. The roots are relatively shallow, so the act of getting it out of the ground is fairly easy. If I did a little every day, I would probably get all of my ivy out by the end of the growing season.
But there is also another way, which better accommodates my natural laziness. The lazy way involves removing the ivy around the more desirable plants by hand, then covering the remainder with cardboard. It’s a good way to recycle all those shipping boxes that will arrive in the next few weeks with the plants that I ordered in the dark days of February. Once the cardboard is on top of the ivy, mulch goes on top of the cardboard. This is a variation of the old newspaper and mulch trick that I and many other people use to create new beds and combat weeds. The ivy underneath the layers eventually dies, and the need for pulling is confined to the edges of the ivy patch, where the plant will attempt to escape and resume its career as a garden pest.
In the front I plan to replace the ivy with more plants and a lot of mulch. Maybe eventually I will install a better-mannered ground cover like big-leaf geranium, Geranium macrorrhizum. The jury is still out, but once the ivy is vanquished, the choices will be greatly expanded.