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Great news. The American Ivy Society now has an impressive outdoor collection in the Northeast. Even better, the collection has both juvenile and adult ivies — all correctly named and growing happily on the ground as well as climbing up the trees.
This is a first. We have had outdoor test gardens at many places such as the American Horticultural Society headquarters, and at Longwood Gardens. But never have we had a mature collection, one where researchers, academics and ivy enthusiasts could see ivy growing in its natural state – without help from fertilizer, cultivation or even much water.
My search - and how I eventually found it when it was under my nose all the time – is a great story. As the photographer extraordinaire and editor of the Ivy Journal, I talk to Rachel Cobb almost every day. Together we work on all the Ivy Society publications, but since she lives in Southern New Jersey and I live in the mountains of upstate New York, most of our contact is by computer or telephone. She has occasionally mentioned how well her outdoor ivies were doing but I just assumed she had a few that were growing well in her backyard.
A few weeks ago I traveled to her home (it’s really a small farm called “ Weedy Acres”) so we could drive together to the American Ivy Society annual meeting in Charleston, South Carolina (see photos on page 6). While there she invited me to see her ivies. We passed by pens holding peacocks, goats, and geese – (all her animals have been rescued) – past the raspberries and the wood shed to the back of her farm. There, growing in such profusion was what I had been looking for all these years. I was speechless! One ivy after another. Some were juvenile, while others were both juvenile and adult as they climbed the trees and clambered over fences. (See partial list at the end of this article)
How did she get so many ivies? When did she start growing them? She told me it all started with her friendship with Pat Hammer (past President of AIS). Rachel had gone to school with Pat’s brother Michael, and both sides of their families knew each other growing up in small towns in New Jersey. Rachel got interested in photography and was lucky enough to work with the best of them at National Geographic as well as many other publications. Pat became seriously involved with horticulture and eventually in 1976 wound up working at Longwood Gardens.
In 1984 Pat became active with the American Ivy Society and began collecting ivy professionally for Longwood and as a hobby at home. Many of her ivies were from the original 1973 AIS collection. In the late 1980’s the AIS research collection of ivy kept at the Cox Arboretum in Ohio needed to find a new home. Albert Hendley, an AIS member, packed up the whole collection and drove it to Pat’s home in Pennsylvania where she devoted an entire glass greenhouse to it. There were probably 300 different ivy varieties in the research collection – some were rare, one of a kind.
In 1990 Longwood Gardens decided to eliminate their ivy collection of about 185 different cultivars. The collection went to AIS and to the research collection at Lewis Ginter Botanic Gardens. Cuttings from the ivy research collection were also sent to a grower at Weidner’s Gardens in Encinitas, California who was interested in getting new and exciting ivies into the mainstream market.
In 1992 Pat Hammer moved to Encinitas to start Samia Rose Topiary since the source for the ivies she needed to make her business a success was located there. Over time, the collection’s stock plants were returned to Pat for proper management and remained with her until 2005 when she closed her topiary business and had to find a home for the collection. Also in 1992 the AIS research collection had been turned over to Russell Windle, the Director of Research for the American Ivy Society, where it remains today.
In 2005 much of the Samia Rose ivy collection was shipped to Russell as back up for the AIS Research Collection and the remaining ivies were shipped to Rachel – Pat’s lifelong friend. “At first”, says Rachel, “I didn’t know what to do with them all, so I just planted them one by one at the base of trees. Some were planted along the edge of the woods so they could spread out and grow up the trees. Still others went onto a little hill in the front of my garden that was full of gravel and dry where nothing would grow and I thought I would try some of the ivy. I started with H.h. ‘Ivalace’” “Then I thought it would be interesting to grow ivies at the end of each of my raised vegetable beds. The ivies handle full sun just fine and they get water when I water my tomatoes and peppers. I just kept acquiring ivies and sticking them here and there.
I planted each of the little Ivy of the Year gift plants next to trees so that, as they grew, they would go up the tree and perhaps become adult.” “I live at the top of zone 7 and even in this past rough winter the ivies didn’t stop looking good with very little die back. They seem to grow year around. My big issue is mainly with wet springs. They don’t like to sit in water and since I am at sea level, I do get some flooding in the backyard.”
“The ivies I planted around the house – where the soil is much better – do so well they must be cut back 3-4 times a year. ”
Rachel told me that the ivies planted in 1989-2000 started to become adult after about 10 years growth. Those are the ones she has left alone mainly because she didn’t have time to give much attention to them. In recent years she has tried planting adult ivies from Russell Windle, and they, too, do well. She has even given back to him some of her adult ivy cuttings so he can propagate them. A few of these adult ivies are being documented for the first time at Weedy Acres.
I asked her how often she fertilized them. She replied with a grin, “I don’t fertilize them at all – I just don't have time. The best I can do is rake the leaves back from the paths and
so, more by accident, the leaves become compost as they cover the ivies.” Whatever she is doing is certainly working. See a list of some of her ivies, click here.
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