It’s a Growing Debate
There’s always a lot of ground to cover when the subject is ivy.
It’s loathsome stuff, says Patricia Earl. “It’s a menace, out of control. None of that ivy is any good.”
No, it’s wondrously beautiful, counters Patricia Hammer. “I can’t say anything bad about ivy. Once gardeners see the varieties of ivies, they’re enchanted.”
Earl is a Hollywood Hills nature lover who is campaigning to rid Los Angeles of burgeoning ivy vines that she claims are killing trees and natural vegetation.
Hammer is an Encinitas ivy lover who creates whimsical ivy statues and promotes the plant in her position as head of the internationally known American Ivy Society.
These days, the pair are entangled in a debate that is as hardy as the Hedera itself: Is ivy a pest, or is it a prize?
Both Patricias are standing pat.
Earl stirred a controversy two months ago when The Times published her letter to the editor warning that rogue ivy was taking over parts of Los Angeles by “insidiously” attacking and killing trees.
Hammer responded by pointing out that the vine is cultivating plenty of new supporters--including those who have joined the Ivy Society’s first L.A. chapter.
Sometimes, it seems ivy just can’t seem to keep its tendrils out of hot water.
Critics around the country have for decades considered it a growing headache-- something that is tenacious enough to swallow up native grasses and smother groves of trees.
They complain that its year-round crop of leaves stand high enough off the ground to harbor everything from rats to mosquitoes. They grumble that the climbing vine is so tough that it can peel siding off buildings and push mortar out of brick walls.
The dispute has gone on even longer in Great Britain, where ivy is known as that country’s only native evergreen climber. Ivy-antagonists have even included the royal family: Queen Mary organized ivy-stripping brigades at a rural castle where she lived during World War II, according to historians.
The ivy debate flared anew last year in Britain after several Patricia Earl-style letters-to-the-editor on the subject were published in the English press, according to the American gardening magazine Horticulture.
“ ‘Ivy-covered cottage’ may be a poetic conceit, but is also a frightening reality to those concerned about their gutters and roof slates,” reported Horticulture. “In the woods, ivy seems to wriggle up the trunks of most trees while your back is turned, converting what was once a nice little ash, say, to a great mop-headed, ivy-leaved lollipop.
“When a strong wind comes along, the whole overloaded mass of greenery--ivy, tree, birds’ nests and all--may very well keel over.”
Those sentiments have a familiar ring to many Americans. Administrators of Harvard University were so worried in 1982 that ivy was damaging their halls of ivy that they decided to rip out all wall-clinging vines--heresy to some at the Ivy League campus.
“There was a big protest at the time, people marching with placards. An ivy wreath was placed on the head of the John Harvard statue,” recalls university spokesman Joe Wrinn.
In Los Angeles, leaders of the Brentwood Park Property Owners’ Assn. once sounded the alarm that Algerian ivy was killing trees in their upscale neighborhood.
“Like rats? Hate trees? Then grow ivy!” the association warned years ago in a brochure prepared by its tree committee.
“It slithers up trees. It covers trunks and branches, shuts out light and air. Rats infest it. Disease kills the tree. The ivy clings to the dead trunk and the withered branches. Only the rats remain alive under its leafy cover.”
Westwood Village resident Faye Wallace agrees. The British-born gardening enthusiast was stunned when she moved to Los Angeles in 1953 and found Algerian ivy being planted in front yards and along freeways everywhere.
“It’s the lazy man’s way of landscaping. It’s an absolute waste of space when you can have beautiful gardens planted with so many different things that don’t lead to having mice,” said Wallace, one of those who responded to Earl’s ivy letter with one of her own. “If I see ivy growing, I pull it out when nobody’s looking.”
Parkland in the Los Angeles area is becoming overrun by a fast-growing vine known as German ivy, according to some.
“It’s smothering hundreds of acres of our Santa Monica Mountains,” complained Jon Earl, son of Patricia Earl and co-founder of the Studio City-based environmental group Rhapsody in Green. “In Laurel Canyon there are huge areas of flat expanses of German ivy covering a flat sandwich of dead, flammable material that used to be chaparral.”
Ivy enthusiasts scoff at such talk, however. They say few buildings are at risk from ivy growing on them. The same goes for trees.
“I’ve never heard of ivy pulling down a building. To the contrary, I think it’s holding some buildings up,” said Ivy Society president Hammer, an ivy topiary artist who has studied the vine for 18 years.
And German ivy isn’t even a true ivy. It’s a vine imported from South Africa over 100 years ago as a house plant, Hammer said.
Sabina Mueller Sulgrove, the Dayton, Ohio-based research director for the Ivy Society, said real ivy suffers from a bad rap.
“If a tree looks like it’s smothered by ivy, chances are the ivy grew after the tree lost its leaves,” Sulgrove said. “Ivies are not parasites. They do not strangle or wrap themselves around things. They attach very fine, unbranched rootlets to surfaces.”
Ivy can grow into cracks in brick walls, she acknowledged. But that most likely occurs in older buildings where old-fashioned lime-based mortar has deteriorated. “It’s not ivy damaging the wall, but the natural deterioration of the soft lime itself,” she said.
Mortar used in construction today is harder, confirmed Los Angeles brick mason James Martin. In fact, tree roots are more of a problem to masonry than ivy, said Martin, of Windsor Hills.
Because ivy is easy to grow and is “one of the best things for checking erosion on hillsides,” it is a popular ground cover in Los Angeles, said landscape architect Roy Kato of Pasadena. Unlike the stubborn kudzu vine that has taken over parts of the South, ivy can easily be tamed, he indicated.
“No, ivy isn’t taking over L.A.,” said San Pedro resident Chrisilla Rezai, president of the Ivy Society’s newly launched Los Angeles chapter. But it takes over the hearts of those who learn to love it.
It sort of creeps up on you, according to Rezai.
