Posted on by tonytomeo · 14 Comments

Horridculture – Ivy League

P90306English ivy, Hedera helix, is probably the nastiest and most aggressively invasive exotic species that I work with. It climbs high into redwood trees and overwhelms understory plants (that live below the trees). It invades many of the landscapes, and worst of all, it climbs building where it ruins paint and causes rot. It grows faster than we can keep up with it.

English ivy is actually a nice ground cover plant for refined landscapes. I grew it at my home in town. Contrary to popular belief, it does not root into and parasitize the trees that it climbs. Actually, it rarely overwhelms and shades out large trees. It prefers to keep them alive for support, from which it disperses its seed. However, it does promote decay in the trunks that it climbs, particularly where it retains moisture at ground level. Native trees are not accustomed to that.

We try to remove as much English ivy at work as possible, which includes removing it from trees and buildings. So far, with a few exceptions of small bits of ivy that broke off high in the trees that it climbed, I have been able to remove all ivy from the trees and walls that I have worked on.

Others were not so fortunate. When quick and efficient removal of ivy from the bases of as many mature trees as possible is the priority, ivy is more often severed down low, and left to die on the trunks of the infested trees. It looks shabby to say the least, and takes many years to deteriorate and fall away. In the picture above, dead ivy that was severed within the past few years is already being replaced by new ivy, which will also need to be severed.

The same technique happens with ivy on buildings. It gets cut at the foundations, but left on the walls to shrivel and turn brown. The dead ivy in the picture below was reaching upstairs eaves when it was severed, and remains there a few years later.

What annoys me so much about this technique is that it does not take much extra effort or time to tug quite most of the lower ivy from trees and walls. For most situations, all ivy can be dislodged, although tiny aerial roots remain. It is much easier to dislodge while fresh than after it is dried and crispy.P90306+

Posted on by tonytomeo · 36 Comments

Very Bad Houseplants

P71230Just because it ‘can’ be grown as a houseplant does not meant that it ‘should’ be. That is a lesson that Brent and I never learned in college. He and I were roommates in the dorms at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, which, as you can imagine, was a problem. Our room on the top floor of Fremont Hall was known as the Jungle Room. It was so stuffed full of weird houseplants, as well as a few plants that had no business inside. We had a blue gum eucalyptus bent up against the ceiling, an espaliered Southern magnolia, a Monterey cypress, and a herd of camellias that we rescued from a compost pile on campus.

After college, our own homes were no better. Because my dining room was rather small, Brent gave me tall weeping figs that had unobtrusively bare trunks down low, and plenty of fluffy foliage pressed up against the ceiling; a technique we did not quite perfect with our Jungle Room blue gum. I had a giant yucca in the guest suite, a redwood in my bedroom, king palms in the parlor, and a lemon gum eucalyptus over my desk in the office. The bathroom was the worst, with pothos and Algerian ivy hanging over the shower curtain, and billbergias up over the shower. A pair of small birds nested in the billbergias, and before I realized that they were there and evicted them, they started a family!

At least Brent kept most of his plants outside where they belong. The staghorn ferns grab onto the walls when they get the chance. Wisteria vines grab onto anything else. The flame vine climbed up the chimney (appropriately), and before Brent knew it, had sneakily spread to the opposite side of the parapet roof! Then there was the giant timber bamboo. Yes, that is what I said; giant timber bamboo. I know what you are thinking right now, so there is no need to say it.

There is a narrow space between north side of Brent’s home and the concrete driveway next door. It is almost three feet wide. Brent though that if he planted the bamboo there, it would not get to the other side of the driveway. He was actually correct.

Did I ever mention how vain Brent is? Well, that is another topic for another time. I will say for now that he has more clothes than his teenaged daughter Grace. A lot more. They do not all fit in his big closet. He hangs some of his longer coats that he does not need very often in Grace’s much smaller closet. One day, he was reaching around the clutter that is common in a teenaged girl’s room, and groping for one of his coats in Grace’s closet, when he grabbed a hold of something that should not have been there. He was not certain what it was at first, but when he found his coat and pulled it out, a few dried bamboo leaves came with it and fell onto the floor!

The bamboo did not even try to go under the neighbor’s driveway. Instead, it went under the foundation of the house. Where it came up, it had nowhere to go, so somehow weaseled in next to a water pipe, and followed it up behind the bathroom washbasin. Once inside, it somehow weaseled past a valve access panel behind Grace’s closet, and straight up to the ceiling. What is even funnier is that Grace knew it was there, but figured that it was just another one of Brent’s crazy landscaping ideas!

Just in case you are wondering, giant timber bamboo is a very bad houseplant!

The bamboo is gone now. It got so tall that the wind would blow it against the terracotta tiles on top of the parapet wall. Also, the foliar litter was too messy on the parapet roof and the neighbor’s driveway. It did not contribute much to the landscape anyway, and shaded only a driveway that is seldom used.