It was only a few short weeks ago that we were singing about the Holly and the Ivy and how when both are full grown the holly bears the crown. It also has a white lily flower blossom, a blood red berry, a thorn-sharp prickle and gall bitter bark. Not one verse mentions ivy’s ‘qualities’. I now realise why. Ivy is a pain in the arse. Destructive to trees and walls it’s like an iceberg; the bits you see are a mere fraction of the yards and yards of rhizomes that burrow like badgers into every available nook and cranny. In fact 21st Century ivy is even worse….it stretches for metres and metres. I’ve always known that ivy was a lot less beautiful in reality than it can at times appear, but its voracious nastiness has only fully dawned on me now that we have a garden that has been unloved and untended for at least four years.
Part of the contractual agreement of living in our College grace and favour home, (I’ve met Grace but no favours as yet) is that we will maintain the very desirable garden to a good standard. I enjoy gardening, even if my unreliable spine doesn’t, but the Herculean task that’s facing us does seem a little unfair. The lack of recent love and attention means it looks more like Sleeping Beauty’s castle shortly before Prince Charming arrived. Sadly I am lacking any royal blood and am probably rather too short on the charm as well, but it is upon my sloping shoulders that the burden has fallen to rectify this horticultural catastrophe. Where are bloody Alan Titchmarsh or Monty Don when you need them?
The first cruel, but essential decision was to spray the whole, beautifully walled garden with a vicious herbicide; not once, not twice, but three times over a period of a few months last summer. Whilst we waited for the eagerly anticipated, but somewhat sluggish grow back I did my best to restructure the lawn areas; the aim being to transform the ratio of weeds to grass so that they could be mistaken for lawns and not ‘grass’ or any other form of dodgy, habit-forming addictive substance. Success has been limited on that score so far and, even with the help of Green Thumb, the moss is making a spirited comeback. Spring is going to be a crucial time. The good news is that practically everything else did suffer a nasty and seemingly lingering demise; with the exception of the …… ivy. The extremely well-informed executioner who performed the spraying reluctantly admitted that “ivy is hard to kill”. Too right it is. Apart from the odd slightly brown-tipped leaf the whole tropical rainforest of creepers is still in place and thriving.
The last few days spent attacking the remaining detritus reminds me of my early days in sports broadcasting. I was a cocky, relatively young thing who knew it all and quite a bit more besides. It was only when one came to commentating on Centre Court alongside Virginia Wade and Ann Jones that you realised how ill informed you really were. I guess it’s true in many walks of life; the more you learn the more you realise how little you know. Horticultural clearance is the same. The more you clear the more you realise there is to clear. That ‘five minute job’ becomes an hour, a day, a whole week and now it’s clear that professional spade-wielding help cannot be avoided.
Whilst the cordon of multifaceted trees that surround our patch are a delightful sight in summer, the effects of Fall present a whole new problem. A few years ago some well-meaning but ultimately misguided soul decided that the three sycamores that rule one side of the garden should have a Preservation Order placed on them. Why?! They’re just giant weeds. Now they are very giant weeds, producing an extraordinary number of very large dead leaves, which have created a seamless carpet over all the flower beds. It’s while I have been raking up this mounting tonnage that I’ve realised the full extent of the problem. It’s not just the miles of rhizomes and metres of wall-wrecking, tree-strangling ivy, but beneath this brown carpet there are hundreds of green shoots breaking through, waving two impertinent fingers at the lashings of herbicide and the herbicide applier.
This, I fear is a story to be continued…..
ADayInTheStrifeOf 