Wings on the River: Just keep planting things

But at least I got some of the blackberries out. They’ll be back — they’re like democracy, very hard to uproot.

The ivy is rebellious. We had (have?) a large island of it out front, smothering a pile of rocks, atop which grow a ragged trio of paper birches.

Ivy is stinky, and poisonous, and a noxious weed from Europe, and doesn’t support many herbivorous insects for birds to eat (see above, stinky and poisonous; who wants to eat that?). It strangles trees and damages walls and chokes off native plants and ties your ankles together when you walk past it. I really don’t like this plant.

So a couple of years ago I sat down beside my ivy patch, unwrapped a few tendrils that had extruded into the road, and rolled them into a ball. Then I started rolling the ball up the rock-pile. When I uprooted the whole noxious, stinking, sticky ivy patch, it made a ball the size of me. I’m sure there’s a joke about the Ivy League in there somewhere.

What I found beneath still astonishes me.

In my hard-packed, desertified summer yard, the ivy-covered soil was dark with moisture, soft with dead leaves. The tangled vines had protected it. In this nourishing darkness, I found multiple damp yellow side-banded snails, the largest I’d ever seen. A massive scorpion slid under a stone. Numerous spiders patrolled the pebbles, each fatter and healthier and more disturbing than the last. Beneath a decaying robin’s nest from several years ago, I found the paper-thin skull and beak of a baby robin, killed I suspect by a certain spectacularly hot drought. Thick layers of leaves had protected it from snow and wind, becoming a small tragic sculpture so strange and awesome — I wish it wouldn’t have been a federal crime to pick it up.

Sadly, I’m a bad gardener. To preserve these small lives, I should’ve cleared the ivy area by area, seeding a groundcover of native plants, watering a bit, mulching. But I left scorched earth.

Winds whisked the leaves up and dried the soil. Nothing grew back but ivy. The snails, spiders, and purple-fluorescent scorpions decamped. Coincidentally, my neighbor snipped his ivy and his flocks of Cedar Waxwings, which occasionally feast on the small nasty blackish berries, also skedaddled.

Trying to help, had I made things worse?

It’s a familiar feeling. But I guess my horrible “tired human with a job” yard maintenance “schedule” mimics the boom-and-bust cycles of nature’s disease and drought. Wild animals and plants are taking advantage, stepping into the bare earth and weedy spots I fail to “fix.” Diversity increases, more life fitting into less space. Where I used to have two species of grass, with irregular mowing I now have five — and mustard, and forget-me-knots, and rove beetles, and goldfinches eating dandelion seeds, and surprisingly-not-dying bulbs.

The birches still grow, despite multiple beheadings from power crews. The ivy battles with a native buckwheat and a carpet of California Poppies born from seed my mom scatters. A beleaguered Oregon Grape, now free, expanded into that space. Robins returned in 2025 to nest again, secure in the shattered trunk of a paper birch, fledging three spotted youngsters, fed on the tart blue berries of Oregon Grape.

Restoration is gradual when the humans are tired, but easier than I thought: Just keep at it.

Yes, the ivy is growing back. My yard is again a terrible mess; earth giving me another chance to patch her up, bit by bit. The new native plants sustain more seeds and insects for birds to eat than the ivy sea did.

If the birds approve, so do I.