Ivy growing on your house
Ivy growing on your house changes once a stem reaches the top of the wall: it stops climbing, grows rounder leaves and starts to flower. In Ross-shire, a 1903 collection says, girls picked ivy with the May dew on it for good fortune.
What it may mean
Look at an old ivy-covered wall and you may notice two kinds of leaves. Low down, the familiar pointed, lobed leaves cling flat to the brick, sending out tiny rootlets as the stem climbs. Near the top, where the ivy has run out of wall and reached full light, the shoots grow outward instead, with plain, rounded leaves, and only there does the plant flower and set berries. Ivy spends years climbing and only blooms once it stops. Working lives often follow a similar curve. The climbing years are spent holding on and going up, and the giving years start at some top, when the effort can turn into flowers for others. An old ivy-covered wall shows both stages at once: clinging leaves below, flowers at the top.
Depending on how you saw it
Ivy flowers buzzing in October
Ivy blooms in fall, when most other flowers are done, and its round heads of small green flowers hum with bees, wasps and late flies. Who depends on what you offer late in the season, when others have finished?
Black berries in midwinter
Ivy berries ripen in late winter, when little other food is left, and thrushes, blackbirds and pigeons strip them from the walls. The same plant a homeowner calls a nuisance is a pantry to them. Which part of your home or habits looks untidy to you but feeds someone else?
Picked with the May dew
In Ross-shire, a 1903 collection says, young women picked sprigs of ivy with the May dew still on them for good fortune, taking care not to cut them with steel. Which early-morning ritual makes your day feel blessed?
Why it happens in nature
Common ivy climbs with small aerial rootlets and keeps its leaves all year. Young climbing stems have lobed leaves; once a stem reaches the top of its support and full light, it forms a bushier adult growth with unlobed leaves that flowers in fall and bears black berries that birds eat in late winter.
What folk beliefs say
Scotland (Ross-shire)
In Ross-shire, the maidens plucked sprigs of ivy with the May dew still on them for good fortune, a 1903 collection says; the sprigs must not be cut, as the touch of steel would spoil the charm.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 807. View the page
Ancient Egypt
Anciently, the same collection says, ivy was sacred in Egypt and was kept to guard people from evil.
Source: Cora Linn Daniels; C. M. Stevans (eds.), Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, Folklore, and the Occult Sciences of the World, vol. 2 (1903), vol. 2, p. 807. View the page
To reflect on
What would you start offering others if you stopped climbing for a while?