Out walking today I came across what i think is a smooth leafed ivy with dark blue berries. It is climbing long distances up through very high trees and through the hedgerows.
Sometimes the more decorative ivies will revert to the plain green. If yo want to grow the more colourful ones, you have to be prepared to keep cutting out all the plain green shoots. I've neglected ours over the wet winter and it seems to have been taken over.
Oh Ivy. My garden is riddled with it. What I find is that once established and turning into ‘trees’ the ivy leaf changes shape to look more like the one in the picture. Our small road was built on an ancient orchard and I have a few of the original tree stumps that have now become ‘ivy trees’.
Left to its own devices it strangles other plants and sucks all the moisture from the soil so nothing else can thrive. The tiny woody little hasps that it uses to cling onto trees, fences and walls are really destructive. I've ripped loads of it out of my garden but it still keeps sneaking back in.
We have it at the front , it’s clambered over a half dead hedge, it fills the gaps though. Although it’s probably the reason that the hedge is so unhealthy.
I'm going to have some of the tall ivy stems sawn through as the ivy is now well up a hawthorn tree, and makes up at least half the mass of a fully grown ash tree.
It ruins brickwork if you have a small wall nearby. In our garden at home, dad had to scrape all the cement out of the bricks because the ivy had rooted itself in between. It's a menace around houses, though might look nice.
I know EllanVannin. My semi detached neighbour rents their house and the shared roof gutter is now invaded. Fortunately the neighbour is easy going and I can just get on and get the work done.
Happy to say it is not in my garden. I do have nice variegated ivies on garden walls which softens them nicely and they are easy to control. And one nicely making its way up the pole of the clothes line.
The house down the road from us has an old ivy hedge. Apparently there was some sort of normal hedging there originally but it got swamped and died. The ivy (the same sort as you speak of) stands alone now with no support making a hedge about two foot thick. The birds love it.
I have a 'fedge' of the goldheart ivy. (A fedge is, or was, a fence covered in ivy - but it conveniently becomes a hedge of ivy as the fence rots away.)
Hetty I have several of those. They are okay as long as they confine themselves to taking over the fence but my ivy fences invade the roof gutters, the hawthorns and the fifty foot ash tree.