I really need a haircut – my last was in July – but at least the Ivy to the right of the archway has had one.
This is a tiny proportion of the Ivy in the garden (which is a joy) but the management plan now includes a timetable for cutting each year.
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Ivy is a plant that doesn’t stop giving. I’m only just beginning to understand just how important this scruffy looking plant is to the whole ecology. Those images look fantastic; I wouldn’t hesitate to have a moth trap underneath starting late March.
Since we have enclosed fenced the whole farm and opened the field gates, the cows now have free access to roam. It freaked them out first but now I’ve been on cow watch and it has been fascinating seeing what they do. The big difference is they have become selective consumers on what they wish to eat. Lock them in a field and they’ll eat the field, whether they partial to the plants or not. Give them a wide choice and it’s like eating a box of chocolates the fudges go first and the coffee creams are left.
Top of their list is the ivy, they’ll enter all the woods and strip away as high as they can the growing ivy from trees and of course from ground level, creating bare patches, ideal for dog-violet, which means yet more fritillaries. They do eat some of my prized arable plants, but that’s OK.
Now these animals are not the mega beasts that roamed and bashed the place up a long time ago, but we have a JCB for that. With the free roaming, pond creation and future plans, everything seems to be falling into place on the farm, we can’t create the natural landscapes of thousands of years ago when man didn’t stick his nose in natures’ works, but we can replicate as near as possible thanks to the free roaming.
These cows are now the architects of habitat creation based on their food preference, and not man, we have little to do other than maintenance. This is what would have happened thousands of years ago with the migrating herds? A swollen river crossing would have hindered the herd’s progress, so the area would succumb to a hard graze, not a bad thing to happen on occasions. Will we ever learn to hand back to nature, it’s a lot better at it than us – of course not, far too much money in it for organisations?
Very encouraging!
In my boyhood and youth I grew up many years ago on a mixed arable and dairy farm, so I can imagine and visualise the excitement of what you are doing.
Thomas – I like coffee creams very much, it’s the strawberry ones that get left here.
Better than sheep for woodlands that’s for sure. I miss our Devon cattle. I well remember herding them through our woods with our five sheep dogs during the summer. They used to absolutely stink!
Let no one forget that ivy is probably the most valuable and important plant for wildlife in the U.K. it provides roosting and nesting habitats for birds and resting and hibernating areas for bats. It flowers later on in the autumn and is a major source of pollen and nectar for insects. My ivy is audibly humming with insects like hover flies, wasps bees and hornets on a sunny autumn day. . It is superb for spiders, late butterflies and moths. As it flowers later in the autumn it’s berries ripen about February and therefore provides a vital food source for birds when most other food sources have been used up.
So if ivy needs to be cut if it is growing on a house or shed and sometimes it does. make sure areas are cut in rotation each year not allat once.
Finally Ivy does NOT kill trees it just holds onto them and usually stays around the main trunk and therefore does not prevent the tree from breathing. So to those real idiots that cut ivy off trees I say you are acting as a major wildlife vandals.
I certainly would not dispute that ivy is highly valuable to wildlife but there may be a few other potential candidates for ‘most valuable’. I would put in a shout for oak (pedunculate or sessile). What other suggestions does anyone have?
Bramble and nettle must be strong contenders. Also really good history of ‘folk use’ if there’s such a term. I’ve had nettle soup and it was very tasty I recall, and you can make a basket from (dethorned) bramble stems to collect your brambles in apparently.
We have lots of Ivy on the small holding and the only time we control any of it is on out few tall conifers, that of course are shallow rooted so we do not want them made even more top heavy by Ivy and on a few very tall skinny alders for the same reason, done in rotation and there is lots of it elsewhere for all the wonderful roles ivy fills.
We have ivy growing on our house from which, I assume, one year came a yellow moth which tried to camouflage itself on a yellow mug. People tell me ivy is destructive to the brickwork. Does anyone know if that’s the case.
Depends on the walls an issue with the type of mortar I believe, but in about 70% of cases it actually helps preserve them by reducing damage from air pollution and frost damage. So usually it’s actually good for walls and I remember years ago in wildlife gardening books it being said that ivy and other climbing plants can act as insulation, something that might be good to highlight these days. This report could help you, if copying and pasting the link doesn’t work try googling ‘Ivy on Walls seminar report English Heritage – https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/research/landscape/rubble/ivy/ivy-report.pdf
Thanks. I’ll follow that up
It certainly can damage walls – I have just repaired part of my back yard wall where ivy shoots had forced their way between courses of bricks and were actually levering apart the back wall from the side wall. As Les suggests it may depend on the type of mortar used and perhaps also its condition.
(I am happy to reassure everyone that the ivy has been cut back a little but not removed)