AND ANOTHER THING
PAUL JOHNSON
What happened to all that ‘ivy never sere’?
People have mixed feelings about ivy (Hedera helix). It is believed to do unhurried damage to buildings while artfully concealing its depredations. ‘Creeping ivy ... hides the ruin that it feeds upon,’ as Cowper says. Not long ago, Jerome, who looks after our London garden, had to cut back the ivy covering the high wall abutting the veranda of my library, thus exposing the brick. This grievously disturbed my postbreakfast period of contemplation, when I look out on the garden and work out what I will write during the day. However, with its characteristic tenacity and fecundity, the ivy has grown back again, the bricks have vanished and the incident is closed. I cannot actually like this plant, with its umbels of greenish-yellow flowers and the dank, sinister berries which succeed them. Why the ancients had such a high opinion of it baffles me; it was dedicated to Bacchus and believed to prevent drunkenness. Ivy wreaths were awarded in the public games and, as John of Trevisa put it at the turn of the 14th century, ‘Oftyn Poetes were crowned with Iuye, in token of noble witte & scharpe, for the Iuye is alwei grene.’ To judge by contemporary prints in late mediaeval, Tudor and Stuart times, property owners had a short way with ivy. Then, from the mid-18th century, with the first glimmerings of Gothick, the Picturesque and the Romantic, ivy came back into fashion and was allowed to swarm all over the outside walls of any building with claims to antiquity. The early Victorians loved ivy and positively encouraged it. But then they had swarms of gardeners to cut it back from the casements of the bedroom floors and, generally, to keep it in order. A willingness to persist or a determination to restrain natural growth is a regular pendulum in human taste. Take beards. In 1850 there were only two members of the House of Commons who had beards. In 1860 scarcely a dozen did not sport them. The catalyst of change was the Crimean war of 1853–56, where the dreadful winter cold meant the heroes of the siege of Sebastopol returned with fearsome beavers, which were promptly imitated by the tribunes of the people. The American Civil War of 1861–65 had a similar effect on members of Congress.
For most of the 19th century, Oxbridge colleges tolerated a staggering amount of ivy on their stonework or, in the case of Balliol, Keble and Selwyn, brickwork. The older American universities followed suit. Hence the origin of the phrase Ivy League Colleges, which described their physical appearance, I think, as much as the wreath awarded for performance in footer matches. ‘Ivy League’ became adjectival, applying to snooty and hated accents, mannerisms, supercilious gestures and togs. But I have never yet met an American who could give me an exact list of these so-called ‘snob schools’. Here it is, for the record: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale.
However, if you examine the buildings of these eight colleges today, you will not find much ivy. For the pendulum swung against ivy with a vengeance. When exactly this happened I am not sure. I think it began in the 1880s and continued for some decades, until most of the ivy was gone. My mother, who was born in the late 1880s, was a confirmed ivy-hater. ‘If you have ivy,’ she’d say in horror, ‘you get earwigs. Thousands of them. In the bedrooms!’ And it’s true. Ivy breeds insects. All very well for Shelley to rhapsodise about ‘the yellow bees in the ivy bloom’, but most of the creepy things which emerge from ivy are less welcome — spiders of all kinds, centipedes and enormous beetles. Late Victorian times were a great age for campaigning against insects and one result was the destruction of much venerable ivy in London, particularly on Georgian brickwork — City churches, Inns of Court and garden walls. It is unusual to see an ivyclad London house. The only one I can think of is Lily Langtry’s in Little Venice, much visited by Edward VII who, I think, was an ivy-fancier, since Sandringham, the house he acquired in Norfolk, was covered in it. But it was in his day that the anti-ivy brigade got the upper hand. Famous ruins, which J.M.W. Turner and other artists had pictured ivy-festooned, were stripped and revealed in all their naked stonework. The National Trust, founded in 1895, was bent on de-ivying all its properties from the start, a policy which continues to this day, and the Church of England commissioners took a similar view.
A lifelong and ferocious enemy of ivy was old Queen Mary, wife of King George V, especially in her long widowhood when she had nothing much to do. Born in 1867, she had learnt her gardening at a time when ivy was just coming to be considered dirty, unhealthy and destructive. Once she became châtelaine of Sandringham in 1925, she set about stripping the vast rambling house of its dark greenery. Having made herself an expert in a hard school, the Sandringham ivy being remarkably tenacious and resilient, and capable of determined counter-attacks, she was always looking for opportunities to get to work. A big chance came in September 1939 when, in accordance with a long-arranged plan, the coming of war saw her take up residence in Badminton House ‘for the Duration’. The owner, the old Duke of Beaufort — who had been delighted to offer her refuge from the bombs — once described to me the moment he realised what he had taken on, when he glimpsed Queen Mary’s motorcavalcade as it emerged from the woods on to the house drive, headed by her darkgreen Daimler. She had been accustomed to having 64 servants at Marlborough House, her London home, and virtually all came with her, crammed into a procession of cars, shooting brakes and vans loaded with baggage, each item of which was ‘indispensable’, as she put it. ‘It was like that line in Macbeth,’ he said, ‘stretching “out to the crack of doom”.’ Once installed, she became aware of the immensity of the ivy problem. ‘I shall have my work cut out,’ she declared, eagerly. Her diary contains such entries as: ‘Lovely morning which we spent clearing ivy off trees. We watched a whole wall of ivy of 50 years standing at the back of [the duchess’s] bedroom being removed. Most of it came down like a blanket.’ She formed regular ‘ivy squads’, which she set to work not only on the house but on the trees in the park and the nine-mile wall enclosing it. Her own servants, estate staff, any visitors, the four dispatch-riders attached to her household by the War Office, and any unoccupied soldiers in the vicinity were all roped in, under her personal supervision. She encouraged operations either from a basket-chair in a farm-cart drawn by two horses, or from her Daimler, which had hacksaws and other vital tools strapped to its back. The Duke, who rather liked the ivy, returned from war service to find not only his house but the entire park stripped. Was it during this period, I wonder, that Ivy ceased to be a popular girl’s name? And was Ivy ComptonBurnett the last to be so christened? How suitable, if so.
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