The British Isles may have given us lovely place names like Surrey and Queen Charlotte City and Dunsmuir Street as well as noble institutions like the English Common Law and Rugby and the House of Commons, but sadly they have also burdened our west coast habitat with invasive species like Gorse and Scotch Broom and English Ivy (Hedera helix).
English Ivy grows even in winter when less aggressive plants have the good manners to go dormant and wake again in the spring flush. What may have started out as a bit of filler in Auntie Joan’s hanging basket or planter may have been chucked into the compost and spread itself out until it is thigh-sized vines climbing 90 feet up the Dougie Firs in the neighbouring forest. You’ve seen it, I’m sure. It’s all over the Sunshine Coast.

Unaware beginning gardeners like myself, who once found it attractive, picturesque even, hiding a bare area of ground or a rotten fence, soon learned that Hedera helix crowds out everything else and can smother your noble Douglas Firs, sucking the life out of them, the weight of the parasite plant bringing down less sturdy trees like vine maples and alders. When I took the advice of seasoned local gardeners and began pulling ivy out of my front yard, I discovered a long abandoned fishing shack hidden under a mass of ivy that had looked like a hillside.

My ivy-pulling enterprise took me a year: pull on one end of a vine and you find it branches out, running yards in various directions, tangling with other ivy plants. You need persistence and secateurs, and probably also a pruning saw to cut through the thick vines that wrap themselves around the bases of trees. You also need vigilance: baby ivy plants spring up in the shade of sword ferns and rhododendrons, and because my neighbours have a rather disappointingly laissez faire attitude to ivy, what thrives on their property wants to enjoy freedom on my side of the fence too, so I have to keep at it from year to year. However, it does get much easier than was my first season of ivy pulling.
Be warned that the Green Waste won’t accept English Ivy no matter what its pedigree may be. You’ll need to find an area where it can dry out and die, on a tarp or suchlike, but don’t let it root itself again. Perhaps you can dispose of it in a burn barrel or a burn pile when burning is allowed. You may get complaints about particulates, but your Douglas Fir and Noble Fir and Arbutus will love you for it. Breathe easy knowing that you’ve done your part for native species.
Mary Beth Knechtel, March 2022