These ivies look lovely, as well as providing valuable wildlife habitat and a late food source for birds and bees
A workshop near me is clothed in ivy like a shawl. It’s tightly woven into the building’s fabric and in autumn it shimmers with bees buzzing as they sup up the late harvest from its flowers. Ivy is truly a sight. It’s very good for pollinators, offering an excellent late source of nectar for many insects, notably bees, but also larval food for the beautiful holly blue butterfly (there are two generations of larvae a year and the second loves to dine on ivy). It’s a dense habitat for many others, too: peer inside any older specimen and you’ll find it full of life, from spiders to bird nests.
Finally, it has beautiful black berries that offer an invaluable food source for birds through winter, and well into spring and early summer. But, as anyone with a wall of ivy knows, it has a habit of using its aerial roots to cling on to whatever it climbs and then stubbornly refusing to let go, which can be a disaster for old mortar. There is a way around this: not all ivies have to climb.
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