Dear Readers, having discussed holly as the First Plant of Christmas, it feels past time to have a chat about ivy. I first wrote about this plant back in 2014, and that post is reproduced below, but since the advent of ivy bees in the UK I have even more respect for this plant. It provides late-season nectar when everything else has gone, and birds love the berries – in our local cemetery I often hear woodpigeons clattering about in the ivy-covered trees as they gorge themselves.

I have found a couple of poems about ivy, and both of them seem to concentrate on its sinuous, creeping nature – rarely has a plant been symbolic of so many different things simultaneously (see my 2014 interpretation below). First up is a poem by none other than Charles Dickens, which appeared in his first novel ‘The Pickwick Papers’. Here, it all seems to be about the plant’s persistence and longevity.

The Ivy Green
BY CHARLES DICKENS

Oh, a dainty plant is the Ivy green,
That creepeth o’er ruins old!
Of right choice food are his meals, I ween,
In his cell so lone and cold.
The wall must be crumbled, the stone decayed,
To pleasure his dainty whim:
And the mouldering dust that years have made
Is a merry meal for him.
Creeping where no life is seen,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Fast he stealeth on, though he wears no wings,
And a staunch old heart has he.
How closely he twineth, how tight he clings,
To his friend the huge Oak Tree!
And slily he traileth along the ground,
And his leaves he gently waves,
As he joyously hugs and crawleth round
The rich mould of dead men’s graves.
Creeping where grim death has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

Whole ages have fled and their works decayed,
And nations have scattered been;
But the stout old Ivy shall never fade,
From its hale and hearty green.
The brave old plant, in its lonely days,
Shall fatten upon the past:
For the stateliest building man can raise,
Is the Ivy’s food at last.
Creeping on, where time has been,
A rare old plant is the Ivy green.

And then there’s this one by Thomas Hardy, which sees ivy as a Femme Fatale, clinging and creeping and ultimately killing the thing that she loves. Ha! Poor old ivy. See what you think. I am intrigued by the ‘drip’ from the beech – I’ve had a quick look and can see nothing to suggest that beech can deter ivy by any kind of chemical defence, so maybe this is a folkloric reference. Does anybody know?

THE IVY-WIFE

by: Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

I longed to love a full-boughed beech
And be as high as he:
I stretched an arm within his reach,
And signalled unity.
But with his drip he forced a breach,
And tried to poison me.

I gave the grasp of partnership
To one of other race–
A plane: he barked him strip by strip
From upper bough to base;
And me therewith; for gone my grip,
My arms could not enlace.

In new affection next I strove
To coll an ash I saw,
And he in trust received my love;
Till with my soft green claw
I cramped and bound him as I wove…
Such was my love: ha-ha!

By this I gained his strength and height
Without his rivalry.
But in my triumph I lost sight
Of afterhaps. Soon he,
Being bark-bound, flagged, snapped, fell outright,
And in his fall felled me!

And now let’s fly back to 2014 and see what I had to say about ivy then.

Ivy is perhaps the most divisive wild plant in the UK. For some, it is a clambering, entwining seducer, a plant of overweening ambition, capable of pulling the mortar out of brickwork and dragginbg the mightiest Oak to the ground.   For others it’s the most valuable wildlife plant that you can grow, providing nectar and pollen for bees and butterflies and shiny black berries for the birds.

Firstly, Ivy as strangler.

In the photo above, we can see the ambitious roots grappling with the bark of a Hornbeam as the plant reaches for the sky. Whilst Ivy can exist perfectly happily in a sprawl in dense woodland (and it is one of the few plants that will survive where there is very heavy leaf cover), it is also not averse to clambering upwards when it comes into contact with a suitable support. But unless it finds soil or a deep crevice, Ivy will use the object solely as a climbing frame, and is not a parasite.

The problem comes when the ivy reaches the top of the tree. Here, it will flourish, and, in a windy spot, the sheer weight of growth can be enough to pull the tree over. In Plants Britannica, Richard Mabey quotes a Dorset man who states that, when clearing ivy from a fallen tree, ‘the weight of the ivy often exceeds the weight of its host’.

And yet, I have a sense that something else is going on here. In much plantlore, the bold, straightforward Holly is seen as expressing the male principle, the sinuous, all-encompassing ivy as embodying the female principle . Could some of the hatred of Ivy, of its clinging,nature, be a kind of sublimated misogyny, a fear of fecundity? We are complicated creatures, and our motives are often hidden, even from ourselves.

Ivy has a long connection with alcohol. Because ivy can smother grapevines, it was sometimes seen as being able to cure a hangover through sympathetic magic. Ivy used to be grown over poles as an advertisement for the quality of the wine on sale at a public house – these poles were known as ‘bushes’, hence the phrase ‘good wine needs no bush’. Many pubs, such as the one below, maintain the link with Ivy:

Furthermore, a bowl made of Ivy wood was said to neutralise the effects of drinking bad wine.

Ivy has a long history, also, as a magical plant, particularly with regard to the protection of domestic animals. In Plants Britannica, Richard Mabey tells how, in the Highlands and Islands, it was plaited into a wreath with Rowan and Honeysuckle to protect the cattle. Animals that have been poisoned by eating Yew or Ragwort are said to eat Ivy when they won’t eat anything else. It is said to tempt a sick ewe to eat after a difficult birth, and to cure eye disease in cattle.

One factor in Ivy’s success is its adaptability. It can form a modest sprawl, it can completely cover a building, or it can change its nature completely and become a shrub. Once Ivy flowers, it becomes a blessing for all kinds of insects when other sources of food are long dead.

All these creatures were photographed on one sunny afternoon last week, clustering around the Ivy flowers and filling the air with their buzzing. For the Red Admirals, who hibernate, this last food might make the difference between surviving the winter, and dying.

Ivy is also the larval foodplant of the Holly Blue butterfly, another reason for having some in the garden.

So, Ivy is generous, sometimes to a fault. From a little sunshine and a few soil nutrients, she can cover a fence and provide hiding places for the nests of blackbirds, niches for the webs of spiders, and food for all manner of flying things. I find it difficult not to love a plant that so many creatures find useful.

And in one  way, I have a link with this plant. Ivy is my middle name, and was given to me to honour my paternal grandmother. She was a tough, tenacious individual, bringing up three children single-handedly after her husband was killed during the Second World War. Like her namesake, she clung on in desperate times, and I hope that, if put to the test, I could summon up the indomitable spirit of my grandmother, and of the plant that we are both named after.