Yesterday, and again this morning, I spent a bunch of hours rescuing the cherry tree from being strangled by ivy. What I thought would be a simple job (just rip the bloody stuff off the tree trunk, let it die, and rip it off when it’s all dried out and withered, yes?). Well. We all know about those simple jobs, eh?
Ripping the bloody stuff off revealed thicker strands of ivy beneath. Pruning that away with secateurs revealed trunks of ivy as thick as your wrist. No, really.
I had originally thought I’d be able to chainsaw the thicker stuff. Yes.
No. I couldn’t get the head of the chainsaw (it’s a big beast of a cutting tool) close enough to the ivy trunks without damaging the tree. So I had to resort to manual effort.
Eventually, after a bunch of physical effort and a lot of very delicate cutting I got all six ivy trunks cut through and started removing what I could (not much). I’ll have to wait until the ivy is dead on the cherry tree (that’s a good book title – Dead On The Cherry Tree) before I can strip it off. It’s murderous stuff, ivy.
I finished the job with all of the thick trunks of ivy cut. But it was so exhausting, doing it all manually, that my team of assistants needed a good lie-down afterwards.
Awful stuff!
We had some growing up the wall at our last house.
It took hours for me to remove it all and there were still tendrils stuck to the brickwork years later.
Aye, that’s why I wince when I see pretty little cottages covered in the stuff – the damage to the brickwork can be terrible!