The Ivy League

Dave does love personal-oriented articles from the staff, so …. ok, you asked for it. Here certainly is one. This does not really have anything to do with photography, and most of the included photographs were taken with my iPhone. Yes, this article is literally about … ivy. Just a peek into some of what I have been involved with outside the office for the past 5 months. This is cross posted from my neighborhood community group. Some may find it interesting.

How To Ivy

We live in a relatively quiet neighborhood in Decatur, GA that interestingly enough is a block away from the Little Creek Horse Farm, which houses 30 or so horses. It’s nice to see the horses out and about, and there’s a 1/4 mile stretch of road with trees and various plant life along a bank lining the fence line, separated by a pathway. It’s natural and peaceful.

Some time this past December/January, there was a county crew that was chopping down and disposing of a huge tree that had fallen ill alongside the path. I noticed several other trees that had been cut down. It dawned on me that this entire 1/4 mile stretch of trees was vulnerable.

Take This On?

Almost every tree along this ¼ mile fence line was blanketed in english ivy, had been for years, some had poison ivy as well, and various sticker vines and other vines reaching into the upper canopy entangling all the branches. These trees were either dying or on their way. They were suffocating from loss of oxygen, moisture and sunlight. I’ve seen once or twice a year a volunteer crew that assembles on a Saturday for a few hours for an ivy cutting, but the scale of the situation was well beyond their efforts.

The trees dying pose a significant hazard to those who might be walking along the pathway, cars driving along the roadway, damage to the fence itself and horses getting out, as limbs could come crashing down anytime.

So I decided to take it upon myself to see if I could help. I love all plant life and wild life, and especially trees. I consider plants to be creatures, I hate seeing them suffer, I want them to thrive. Maybe I could trim some ivy on some of the trees near our house. This was in early January. I actually made pretty good progress, and it was enjoyable being outside and away from iPhone screens, not to mention good activity/exercise. After several trees, I took a deep breath and decided to just keep going.

Removing ivy from trees is not super difficult in general, but it depends on how long the ivy has been allowed to grow. Nearly every tree was blanketed from the ground to 3/4 of the way to the top. And when I say blanketed, I mean blanketed. No gaps. Stems over an inch thick, all interlocked with each other. There were some skinny trees, quite a few huge trees, but mostly medium size trees, 12” – 20” in diameter, 30’ – 40’ tall.  To do this level of work, you need a commitment, and you need the right tools. The tools below are indispensable.

Tools

Of course, a good lopper is needed. Some of these ivy stems and roots exceeded 2 inches in diameter. This one was heavy duty enough, and worked well.

An appropriate pruner makes a big difference. With some pruners, the handle default position is too wide, too far apart, and if you don’t have large hands, you can’t just pick it up with your hand on the handles ready to go, you have to pick it up first and then wrestle the handles down so you can grip them. And if the handles are too short, this makes it difficult. These grips are not super far apart, but also they are relatively long, so you can grab them by the narrower portion of the grips. They’re also good and sharp and sturdy. These held up through the entire project.

This forked prod (??) was THE essential tool. I don’t remember when I bought this or where, but it is invaluable for inserting under the thick ivy stems that are attached to the tree (often with a fierce grip) and then working them loose.

Yes, a hatchet. Sometimes the vines were so thick, so interlocked, and so fastened to the tree, they couldn’t be loosened with the above tools. In this case, the hatchet was necessary. Of course, you have to be careful with a hatchet, you don’t want to cut the tree itself.

I’ve used these gloves for years. I don’t know if they come in different sizes or one size fits all, so they could be too big for some, but they’re not very expensive, and they are reasonably rugged and thick. I’ve even pulled up sharp sticker vines from the ground with them. If you have tough work to do, these are great because they protect your hands well and if they eventually get destroyed, it’s not expensive to discard them ($3-$4 per pair).

Something I quickly learned was that you need a surface for your tools also. I found that if I dropped any of these tools so I could then grab some ivy, the tool easily disappeared underneath the bed of ivy and 10 minutes later I’d find myself searching everywhere for it – even the yellow handled hatchet would be rendered invisible. You need a work surface so they don’t get lost. I use a leaf bag, it works better than a white garbage bag, for instance, because it has some thickness, you can also use it when you’re on you knees and your knees will be resting right on top of whatever lumpy or sharp stuff is underneath, so plastic bag – no good.

Techniques and Challenges

You can cut ivy at the ground level of a tree and the ivy above will eventually die. However, due to the urgent and dire condition of these trees I wanted a solution more near term beneficial and more sustainable. I wanted the ivy not just cut at the bottom, but the volume cut away as much as possible. And with extreme prejudice. I didn’t just cut the ivy, I brutalized it. I was rough with it. I pulled it away from the tree, I cut it hard, I wanted it to remember that this was not a good idea. I believe plants learn and have memories.

But, I also wanted to remove as much of the ivy blanketing the tree as possible. The more of the tree I could relieve from the blanket of ivy that had been suffocating it for years the better. So my technique is to start not at the bottom, but around chest high. I first pull the leaves from the ivy so I can see what I am up against underneath. If you only cut the ivy at the ground, this could take a very long time to pull away by itself.

Then I cut those vines. And then I pull the vines from there down and away from the tree. These often come away in interwoven vine collections. Once pulled away, I then work at the bottom of these vines, I source where they come from and cut as much away as can, roughly.

I then do the same with the chest level vines growing up. Some of them can be grabbed as a bunch and pulled and you can pull off an entire huge strip, 10 – 20 feet. The relief the tree feels when you do this is palpable.

Sometimes the vines can pull some bark away. Trees cannot re-grow bark, but they can grow a protective callus over those areas. If you leave the vines hanging, they will of course eventually die, lose their grip and fall. But it could take a while. So there is a balancing realm of faster relief, vs some small areas of bark loss.

Since these trees had been covered for so long, and many of them clearly were in distress, I chose the more urgent method to give them relief sooner by pulling as much of the ivy away as possible. Generally speaking, the vast majority of the bark was maintained, and the trees could begin recovering right away.

Progress and More Challenges

About halfway on the 1/4 stretch of fence line, there is a creek that separates the pastures. Once I reached this creek, I thought I might be finished. The rest of the fence line extends out to the main road and it just felt like that was a lot more work to complete, maybe someone else might take up the work. But I decided to keep going.

Also the remaining half appeared more difficult. By now it was April, and temps were warming up. Insect activity was increasing, ant bites were a regular occurrence now as they fell from the ivy onto me from above, or crawled into my gloves and my clothing. Yes, I had ants in the pants. I never understood the ant’s perspective. You landed on me, I’m not detaining you, just jump off! When you’ve been bitten by ants or stung by something or other 6-8-10 times in a day, it can take something out of you. On the plus side, not a single tick or snake was seen, and I had no encounters with yellow jacket nests. Occasionally I ran into some really nasty sticker vines and I didn’t always come out on top.

And while I did not encounter much poison ivy in the first half section, the second half had a lot more, and a lot growing up into the trees, sometimes mixed in with the english ivy. This slowed things down a bit. I’m not super sensitive to poison ivy, but I’m not immune, so a tree with poison ivy covering it had to navigated carefully. Imagine grabbing a clump of poison ivy with your gloved hands, pulling on it, and wondering how you would avoid the cavern of poison ivy coming down on top of you. This was wondered more times than I would have liked.

I am a certified expert at identifying poison ivy. I can walk along a road, with clumps of thick growth on the side and at a glance, spot poison ivy amidst all the other vegetation. It’s not just the 3 leaves, there’s a certain shape yes, but also pattern, texture, and irridescence to the leaf. Once you see it enough times, you can spot it anywhere. So how do you know if you’re grabbing a poison ivy root or an english ivy root from the same tree? The poison ivy root will often have red filaments.

For the second half of the stretch, I decided to start that 1/8 mile distance from the end and work back toward the middle. While this stretch wasn’t super difficult, some trees were just plain hard to get at. But progress was happening.

Things went well until I drew nearer to the middle and there, the tree area gained more depth. Instead of two or three rows of trees on a bank, covering roughly 10’ – 15’, the area widened to 30’ or more, with no worn pathway. There was also a creekbed that split it, which meant at times I was balancing on the edge of a steep bank.

This was the hardest part, of course, nearing the end. And now with it May, temps were in the mid 80s with high humidity. That’s a big difference from 48 – 58 degrees in low humidity in January – March. Most days in January – March, I put in 3-5 hours a day. But in April – May, I was down to 2-3 hours. While the first three months of this project were actually enjoyable, the last 2 months were a slog and I couldn’t wait to be done. And now I am!

On the day I finished, I walked to the end of the fence line and began a tree count. I estimated there some 200+ trees over the 1.4 mile I had de-iveyed. But as I walked from one end to the other, my count surpassed this, culminating in a total 343 trees de-iveyed. Holy crap! I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment of course, this was hard, hard work. But more importantly, I feel great pleasure knowing that all these trees are now happy and relieved and have a chance to live their long fulfilling lives.

Interactions

Along the way, I had many interactions with people walking by (and many doggies being walked). Most expressed gratitude (even the dogs), some initiated interesting discussions about the task of pulling ivy.

Here’s the thing. If you have ivy growing on your trees, once you remove it, it is easy to keep it at bay. 5 months after beginning this project, barely any trees are even showing any ivy attempting to grow back, even the trees at the very start that were cleared in January. Once you clear the ivy then your maintenance is maybe 3-4 times a year – at most – you spend a few hours doing a little tree base ivy pruning. That’s it. Easy.

I did end up collecting plenty of trash, but also some interesting items, including traffic cones, a 3 foot pane of tempered glass buried in the mud of the creek bank, somehow still intact (anyone want it?), various tennis balls and other dog toys, a man’s winter coat buried in the ivy, plenty of cans, bottles, broken glass, etc.

Also, I have a family of wildlife that interact with me in my yard, and sometimes they follow me. Miss Phoebe liked to hang out with me at times, so I had to bring some mealworms with me so she wouldn’t be disappointed. She would patiently wait, even sitting on branches of the tree that I was pulling the ivy off of, it would whoosh right by her and she wouldn’t move.

Wrap Up

Once I completed this, I had the thought of invoicing the county for this work. Each tree, with my thorough method, took 20 – 40 minutes to clear (a few took slightly less time, some took even more time). Based on this calculation, with an average of 30 minutes per tree, that’s 10,290 minutes,172 hours. Times a reasonably average of $125 per hour for a landscape crew, that comes out to $21,438 the county would owe me. So I prepared an invoice, it looks like this:

However, I happened to visit the horse stable this week and met Tamara Dillard for the first time, who told me that these hours can be logged as volunteer work and matching grants can then accrue to benefit the horse farm. This is great.

Incidentally, I work full time, so this work all happened on the weekends when I wasn’t traveling 12 hours roundtrip to see my daughter, who has been undergoing medical treatments this spring. So, this year has pretty much been work, daughter, ivy. I wish to thank my lovely wife Rachel, who I adore, for her encouragement and support.

I work at a company called, yes, Capture Integration, we’re a small but mighty, specialized company that sells high end photographic equipment, and our owner, Dave Gallagher, has had a policy for years that any employee who wishes to do volunteer or charity work can be comped for that time, up to a week. Isn’t that great? Wouldn’t you want to buy from a company like that?

I hope that others in the community will take some time to do some ivy trimming at Little Creek. After years and years of build up, all 343 of these trees are now free of ivy, and just a few follow up trims a year is all that is required now to keep these trees healthy. There are certainly some piles here and there of massive vine pulls, and after a break, I will take a look at these and remove the problematic piles.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Your purchase strengthens our business, and we appreciate it!

steve@captureintegration.com – 404.543.8475

More From Steve:

https://www.captureintegration.com/steve-hendrix/

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