Ever find it ironic that what many volunteers do to celebrate Earth Day is rip out vegetation?
It may be silvery-green and star-shaped, and it may add “class” to brick walls lacking a little something, but English ivy has been declared a seriously unwelcome invader by the Washington State Noxious Weed Control Board. What used to be considered a sweet garden-border decoration, imported from Europe, has jumped the fence and run across the continent. It’s an aggressively spreading vine that carpets over and snuffs out everything it touches, horizontally and vertically.
Understory plants and small trees can’t compete with ivy; big trees get so weighed down, they’re easily damaged or even toppled by wind and weather. Uncontrolled English ivy results in a monoculture landscape, lacking any healthy diversity of plants and wildlife (except rodents), and a dying forest. That’s why volunteers on Earth Day, and other outdoor-work-party occasions, gleefully grab that invader and yank it out.
Ongoing battlefield
Blandford Canyon is one of Vancouver’s ongoing ivy battlefields (and you can join a work party there one week after Earth Day), but here’s another, remoter opportunity: Columbia Grove, a small riverfront annex of east Vancouver’s Columbia Springs Environmental Education Center. Columbia Grove includes “some of the last wild chum salmon spawning ground on that section of the Columbia River,” said Columbia Springs executive director Maureen Montague, whose agency plans to restore and preserve the site “as an incubator for rare native and endangered species” by working with the city and the Watersheds Alliance of Southwest Washington.
