Today I chopped back the Boston ivy, Pathenocissus tricuspidata, from the end of the house and the floor of the veranda. It wasn't planted by us but was already here when we arrived, on the other hand after twenty years we could have taken it out if we'd wanted to. It is a beautiful climber, which is why I've never had the heart to trace its stems back to their origin and destroy it at the root, but it is rampant. Really much too rampant. The best way to display it would be growing up a large tree, where it could rampage to its hearts content and turn the tree in autumn into a waterfall of red leaves, but on a house it is a menace.
The tips of the new shoots look very soft and innocent, and so do the new little leaves when they are only the size of a ten pence coin, but they expand until they are larger than my palm, lobed and shiny in a pleasant shade of mid green. In autumn they turn a vivid, flaming red. The flowers are small to the point of being entirely negligible, but are attractive to insects so that in summer the plant hums with foragers. It clings as it climbs, to anything that it encounters. Walls, window frames, the very glass of the window, gutters. The innocent new shoots quickly thicken, and if they creep along underneath window sills or in any other crack they can get into they will lift anything even vaguely movable and cause structural damage as they grow. The little suckers it uses to climb with are remarkably persistent, and remain visible on brickwork for years after you've pulled the stems off.
I got most of the unwanted stretches off today, other than some which broke away from the main stems at the very top of the south gable end, where we can't reach it without erecting the scaffold we've got for painting the house. The Systems Administrator managed to dislodge some by twiddling the waving stems around a hoe head while standing balanced on a step ladder and tugging, so at least there aren't strands of it hanging down in front of the dining room window any more, but the topmost parts eluded us. Alas, the little suckers have stayed stuck to the wood cladding, and past experience has taught us that that's where they'll remain until the next time the wood is sanded and varnished.
The piles of Boston ivy stems across the patio and on the deck outside the study merely added to the other piles of prunings already littered around the garden. The SA has promised to fire the old tractor up before we go away, and run around the garden with the trailer to collect the debris, and suggested I might as well get on with any other pruning that needed doing so that it could all be collected at the same time. The old tractor does not start very easily, and has a slow puncture in one tyre which has to be inflated before use, so it feels more worthwhile starting it up for a proper clearing session than to haul one trailer load. Though given how many wheelbarrow trips a trailer full equates to, there are times when I'd be happy to get the tractor out even for a single trailer's worth of stuff destined for the bonfire heap.
I took some more off the shrub roses that tilted out over the lawn this spring. It wasn't a final, loving, shaping, definitive prune, but I was sure I didn't want that much long growth sticking out over the grass. Escaping tentacles of 'Paul's Himalayan Musk' were added to the pile, and the seed heads of some clumps of Acanthus spinosus I know I want to reduce this autumn, purely to get them out of the way. I took the top off an elder bush that had sprouted prodigiously by the conservatory, and was casting shade where it wasn't wanted and looming over the potted Fatsia jaonica (which is looking so much greener and better after several doses of fish, blood and bone). It feels slightly like putting the proverbial cart before the horse to go round chopping pieces off shrubs in order to fill up a trailer, but they were all things that I knew needed reducing. I've warned the SA, though, there's going to be a lot more where that came from this winter, once I get stuck into pruning properly.
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