As promised...

[rivka]

...pictures of our ivy disaster.

Looking along the length of the disaster. I think this picture actually understates the mess, but it's the best we have:


A couple of side views showing how far the ivy extended from the wall, and with our trash barrel providing scale:




These dark glossy leaves belong to one of our magnolia trees, buried in ivy:


Where the ivy should have been:


A Gothic close-up, in case the full horror has yet to strike you:

Comments

[threeringedmoon.livejournal.com]

It looks like a Swamp Thing, without the swamp.

[janetmiles.livejournal.com]

That's a lot of ivy.

[old-hedwig.livejournal.com]

I actually had it coming IN THE WINDOW of a house once. Worked ots evil way between the frame and the brick. When we bought our current house, the first thing I did was start ripping out ivy. Friends and in-laws were somewhat surprised at my wrath, thought the ivy was not that ugly, mebbe I should just thin it a bit. My mother knew better. I would not rest until it was GONE!

[pixel.livejournal.com]

"A friend of mine has Ivy all along the rear of her house. Her housemate cut it down to a stump on year, and by the next spring it had completely resumed it's former hieght and former task of insinuating itself between the louvers of the porch windows."

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

::sings::
Mairzy doats and dozey doats
And liddle lamzy divey,
A kiddlely divey too, wouldn't you?

[kate_nepveu]

Thank you so much, I'd just about got that song _out_ of my head after the first posts on this!

[filkerdave.livejournal.com]

This post brought to you courtesty of Earworms-Я-Us.

[therealjae.livejournal.com]

Okay, that *is* a rather large mess.

-J

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

When my folks bought their house the hill behind it (a very steep slope, wooded in pine) was, in the near distance (from the four foot retaining wall back about six feet, and about fifty feet wide) covered in a type of cape weed (iceplant).

I removed it. I came to loathe it. Like the ivy the undergrowth gets, "dead" and becomes a wiry, sinewy, tough mat, which refuses to come up easily.

It was how I learnt to wield a small machete. Took about a month to get it out (after school). The sap is sort of irritant caustic too.

That ivy looks just as bad.

TK

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Ah, now iceplant I have a permanent fondness for. Iceplant saved my mother's house from burning down in the brushfires of '88.

[vito-excalibur.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm glad your mother's house didn't burn down. But if you live in California, iceplant (http://www.nps.gov/redw/iceplant.htm) is an invasive exotic that spreads widely & destroys local ecosystems (http://www.lakemerced.org/NativePlants/TheMesa/mesa.html). If at all possible, it's good to try & plant native (http://www.sbbg.org/sections/visitor_info/visitor_info_level_3/visitor_info_level_4/alternatives.html) or less invasive (http://www.sccgov.org/scc/assets/docs/387434brochure.final2.pdf) species with similar features instead. (http://watershed.csumb.edu/ron/ron_pdf/Invasive_Plants.pdf)

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Ah. It doesn't appear to be nearly as pervasive in non-sand areas, IME (but I am not a horticulturalist by any means).

I don't know that any of the alternatives of the "dune" sort would grow in the very clayey soil where my mother is.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You're right. I had no idea.

K. [we have a few kinds of climbing vines around here but it's too cold for ivy]

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

Oh my – that much ivy. I really hadn't begun to get a grip on what this meant. Thank you so much for photographing it.

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Oh my – that much ivy. I really hadn't begun to get a grip on what this meant.

Hee! That's what everybody says. That's why we insisted that our landlords actually come out to the house and look before they made their removal plans. Sure enough, the tenor of their suggestions changed completely.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Whoa.

Besides the sheer mass of plant matter, the girth of some of those stems is pretty freakin' impressive, too.

Has the landlord begun the cleanup yet?

[rivka.livejournal.com]

Yes, the cleanup proceeded very quickly once it became clear that we wouldn't have a phone line until it was done. Our landlords came over to survey the damage last Monday, we got permission to access the various necessary neighboring yards and pass-throughs on Tuesday, and two lovely gentlemen with chainsaws and a truck showed up early Wednesday morning. They left the courtyard so spotless that we could've eaten our dinner off the bricks. It was wonderful.

[kightp.livejournal.com]

Cool!

Keep an eye out for regrowth in the spring. This stuff is like the Return of the Living Dead of the plant world ...

[trinker.livejournal.com]

Having grown up around large masses of ivy, that was pretty much what I expected, but impressive nonetheless.

Looking forward to hearing that it's all gone.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

Well, if I need some ivy I know who to ask.

B

[erin-c-1978.livejournal.com]

Dude. It's like kudzu.

[edschweppe.livejournal.com]

Yowtch. That's a lotta ivy.

I'm glad to hear that it's been taken care of - at least for this growing season - and that it wasn't raspberries. (They don't necessarily climb, but they create awful prickly-stickly hells.)

[rivka.livejournal.com]

But think of the pies!

[deyo.livejournal.com]

Okay, I parsed all of that in the wrong order, and I must now spend several hours getting the concept of "ivy pies" out of my head.

But on the bright side, now you do too.

[micheinnz.livejournal.com]

I believe the technical term for that is one metric arseload of ivy.

(That's a LOT of ivy!)