The Living Urban Matrix: Ivy on Brick Walls

“Look at the ivy on the cold clinging wall,

Look at the flowers and the green grass so tall;

It’s not a matter of when push comes to shove,

It’s just an hour on the wings of a dove.”

                        --Van Morrison

Photo: Virginia Creeper (Parthenocissus quinquefolia) is used by many birds and mammals for food and habitat. (Brzuszek, 2016)

Bricks are fired handfuls of soil that once nurtured generations of grasses, shrubs and wildflowers. Now they lie dormant in plumb level rows between thin sheets of cold building mortar. Do they dream of a day to once again nurture life for an emerging seed? Maybe the ivy, used here as a general term for ivy-like things, senses this time-honored plant + soil relationship and creeps across the brick in a lover’s touch. Bricks support ivy so that its leaves can reach the sky and in return ivy drapes the building in a lace skin, cooling it to the touch in the hot summer sun.

Living Urban Matrix Element: Ivy on brick walls

Habitat: on buildings everywhere

Ecological services: the cooling of structures (2014 research by C. Bolton, et al, found that ivy coverings averaged 1.4 degrees Celsius warming at night, with 1.7 degrees Celsius cooling in day—resulting in an 8% energy savings ((Building and Environment 80:32–35, October 2014)). Plants also absorb rain water that ameliorates stormwater flooding (Living Architecture: Green Roofs and Walls, 2011, CSIRO Publishing).

Biodiversity values: creates excellent habitat and nesting for wildlife throughout the year for “many species of birds, insects and small mammals” (http://www.suffolkwildlifetrust.org/sites/default/files/ivy_0.pdf)

A Secondhand Life

“A row of daffodils and red tulips nestled against the walkway beneath my feet. Stray weeds peeked up through the cracks in the concrete, a reminder that that nature had the final say. No matter how much mankind bulldozed or built, all was vulnerable to Mother Nature's whims.”

― Pamela Crane, A Secondhand Life

The Ruined Cottage

“It was a plot

Of garden-ground, now wild, its matted weeds

Marked with the steps of those whom as they pass’d,

The goose-berry trees that shot in long lank slips,

Or currants hanging from their leafless stems

In scanty strings, had tempted to o’erleap

The broken wall. Within that cheerless spot,

Where two tall hedgerows of thick willow boughs

Joined in a damp cold nook, I found a well

Half-choked with willow flowers and weeds.

I slaked my thirst and to the shady bench

Returned, and while I stood unbonneted

To catch the motion of the cooler air

The old Man said, “I see around me here

Things which you cannot see: we die, my Friend,

Nor we alone, but that which each man loved

And prized in his peculiar nook of earth

Dies with him or is changed, and very soon

Even of the good is no memorial left.”

---Wordsworth, The Excursion, Book I ("The Ruined Cottage")