American Grove
Problem: English Ivy
This is probably the biggest challenge we faced when reclaiming the forested area on our campus for a nature center. Many of the older buildings around our school have used English Ivy for 100 years or more to decorate their grounds. While it grows well and looks very nice, it has escaped in many areas to completely overtaken much of the forest in our area. This is a small wooded lot across the street from us and you can see that the ivy has taken over the entire understory and is in the process of overtaking the trees themselves.
Comment
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Comment by Washington Yu Ying PCS on July 19, 2012 at 10:35am -
Thanks Vincent! This is definitely something I should be sharing with our neighbors...the Ivy is VERY bad in some parts of Ward 5, as some of the neighborhoods have been relatively undisturbed for some time, giving it an opportunity to takeover a lot of ground.
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Comment by Vincent Verweij on July 18, 2012 at 8:37pm -
Arlington County's Tree Stewards have developed an amazing flyer that everyone is welcome to use, to inform the public about the negative effects of English Ivy. Check it out here:
http://www.arlingtonva.us/departments/parksrecreation/documents/fil...
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Comment by Washington Yu Ying PCS on July 17, 2012 at 10:52am
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Thanks for asking. This stand is actually alive and well because it's not on our property, but rather the adjoining forested area. I just used it as an example of what ours used to look like. For the English Ivy, it didn't pose a particular "threat" to our students like Poison Ivy, so we opted for a lot of grunt work as opposed to herbicide. We have cut most of it at the base of every tree and then used manpower. Volunteers did a full day of the fine-tuned work, like separating plants we wanted to keep from the ivy and pulling it out around them (we can not thank them enough, it was hard work), then we had a bobcat come in with our arborist and clear most of the area by dragging the ground and basically ripping out as much as he could get to. We'll have to do a few cycles of pulling and replanting natives so that we can build up some competition. You'll have to keep following, there will be a lot more work done as we move forward.
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Comment by Administrator on July 16, 2012 at 11:16pm -
How did you remove the Ivy from the ground?
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