When I am doing battle with the English ivy at home, I am convinced there is nothing worse. It inveigles its way into the garden beds, climbs the sides of the house and races up and over the perimeter fence. Some days it scales the trees faster than the squirrels. If you tear it off a painted surface–like the side of the house–it leaves behind tell-tale marks that are hard to remove.
Now, as I clean up the area around the mortared stone retaining wall behind our summer cottage, I know that English ivy has met its match–wild grape (vitis riparia).
the retaining wall has long been cloaked in ivy, which three generations of us have now cut back as necessary. Actually, since we are seasonal residents, sometimes we let it go way past the necessary stage.
Wild grape is sometimes known as “riverbank grape” and the vines at our place have clearly mistaken the retaining wall for a riverbank. Right now vines are flowering, which means that hundreds of bees vie with me for control of those blossoms. I am an eco-conscious gardener, but I don’t worry unduly about the large piles of wild grape that I consign to the compost pile. There are hundreds of grapevines festooning the trees in the adjacent woods and getting up close and personal with the prickly hawthorns in the hedgerows. Should I finish cleaning up the wall area before the end of vacation and decide to make wild grape jelly, there will be plenty of fruit.
There are those who say native plants cannot be invasive. I have two words for them–“wild grape.”