My fiancée Allison and I moved into a Redondo Beach, California, duplex back in January.  The building runs perpendicular to the street, and we live in the back unit; hence we control the small yard between our house and the neighbors' property.  And since Redondo Beach used to be a sand dune and we live on the side of it, the neighbor's house is about fifteen feet higher than ours.  Our yards are separated by a white-painted cinder block wall.
      So far I've spent the better part of two weekends pulling some fifteen cubic yards of English ivy from the wall.  The vines had completely overrun the wall when we found it, and had grown outward up to four or five feet in a huge hanging mass over the yard.  It had overtaken the wooden fences at both ends of the wall, threaded into our neighbors' yards on all sides, and entangled the crowns of two large flowering trees and a thirty-foot palm.  When I began cutting I discovered several beer cans, a pair of children's' boots, a rusted garden trowel, and four opossum nests.  The largest vine was the size of my thigh.
      The vines were so entrenched in the soil below the wall that I had to use an axe and a flat-bladed pick to dig them out.  I found single roots more than three inches across, and a root cluster with a cross-section of more than one square foot.  Later I pulled a ranging root from a flower bed beside our house, thirty feet from the plant's center and on the other side of a four-foot concrete walkway.
      Allison doesn't understand why I'm doing it.  We are only renting this place, and will not live here more than eighteen months.  She wants a yard; the heap of dying ivy branches waiting to be hauled away in our weekly "Green Waste" bin makes her crazy.  The neighbors also probably think I'm insane, though they are always complementary and even hauled a truckload of debris to the landfill at their expense.  Probably they are grateful for the increased property value my work gives to their house, and if I'm a little eccentric, so be it.
      A few years ago, back home in Portland, Oregon, I spent a college semester watching English ivy.  The plant is a plague.  Everyone has heard the aphorism that when the end comes, the only remaining thing will be cockroaches:  English ivy will likely be there also.  It has no natural predators, it can grow nearly anywhere with water, and in a temperate climate such as western Oregon or coastal California, it never goes dormant.  It can overtake and destroy entire forests by growing over and choking all other species, and by weighting down the limbs of trees to the point of collapse.  It can crack foot-thick walls of steel-reinforced concrete, as it has in our Redondo Beach yard.
      So far as I'm concerned, anyone who purchases, sell, plants, or otherwise profits from the trafficking of ivy should be subject to strict criminal prosecution.  No exceptions, no excuses.  It should be banned from sale at every nursery in North America and its seeds destroyed like a pandemic virus, and its vines should be pulled from every fence, wall and yard.  Beginning with mine.

Click here to read the results of my college study.