Ivy

Ivy, Hedera helix, is a woody evergreen climber of European woods and walls, clinging by aerial rootlets and staying green through the hardest winter. In the classical world it was the plant of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine and ecstasy (the Roman Bacchus): his followers wore ivy wreaths, his sacred staff, the thyrsus, was wound with ivy and vine, and ivy was thought to temper the heat of wine, so that a wreath of it was worn against drunkenness. An ivy bush hung outside a building marked it as a tavern, the origin of the old saying that good wine needs no bush.

The word ivy also names a modern American institution: the Ivy League, referring to a group of old northeastern universities whose historic buildings were often covered in climbing ivy, was used informally from the 1930s before being formalised as the name of an intercollegiate athletic conference in 1954, a purely secular and modern extension of the plant's old association with venerable age and unbroken continuity. Outside Europe ivy has become an ecological liability rather than a blessing: English ivy, Hedera helix, is classed as an invasive species across much of North America, where its climbing growth smothers native trees and its groundcover shades out understory plants, a modern conservation problem quite apart from its ancient status as the plant of Dionysus.

Culpeper placed ivy under Saturn. Its clinging habit and its unfailing green made it, across European tradition, an emblem of fidelity, attachment and undying affection, the plant that holds fast and never fades, and it was woven into wedding wreaths for that reason. Paired with holly, it belongs to the midwinter greenery of the northern year, holly taken as male and ivy as female in the old carols. It carries a double edge: faithful and enduring, but also parasitic and funereal, planted on graves as a sign of life persisting past death. A single evergreen vine thus binds together wine, faithfulness, marriage and the enduring green of winter.

Ivy flowers unusually late in the year, from September into November, when almost nothing else is in bloom, making it one of the last significant nectar sources available to bees, hoverflies and other insects before winter; the plant's ecological value at exactly the season it is gathered as midwinter greenery is a genuine natural historical fact that sits alongside, rather than explains, its much older symbolic reputation. Ivy also marks a specific date in Irish political memory: Ivy Day, the sixth of October, commemorates the death of the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, and supporters traditionally wore a sprig of ivy on that day, a nineteenth-century political use layered onto the plant's much older funerary and evergreen symbolism.