She creeps, she climbs, she stuns and she won’t budge

You’ve seen this vine everywhere. In the spring and summer it probably registers to many as one of many nondescript green things that cling to walls. This one climbs to the tops of buildings and often covers the ground in areas unattended to by human hands, your average abandoned lot or unloved building that has been allowed to fall into disrepair. Its growth is so relentless as to seem mission driven — is this plant singlehandedly trying to rewild every wall in New York City? But when fall comes the vine is a different beast entirely, it’s no longer green, it’s a fuchsia boa glamming up those grey concrete walls. Some walls are adorned with just one boa, others are matted with them.

Let’s say you do pass the vine in the summer. You see that it’s a vine and you know enough about plants to know that it’s not English ivy, so your next guess is the other vining plant you have heard of: poison ivy. You wouldn’t be the only one to make this mistake, because it’s a common mistake and I’ve made it too. But the glamorous lady that graces our walls and reclaims territory is Virginia creeper. She’s called thus not because of any semblance to the type of man who would follow teen girls, or because she sneakily scales walls, but because she stealthily creeps along the ground, spreading her viney tentacles. She could have easily been called the Virginia climber, because she’s really good at doing that due to the adhesive discs that can be found on tendrils sprouting from the plant’s stem. Or just Virginia beauty would have sufficed. But decisions made long ago are not easily undone.

Her scientific name is Parthenocissus quinquefolia. Parthenocissus apparently means virgin, which I don’t really want to delve into — though it does make me wonder about the botanists who christened this plant. Quinquefolia is an objective description of the plant’s palmately compound leaves, which have five leaflets with elegantly serrated edges. Poison ivy, on the other hand, has leaves of three. According to some cursory research (going onto Wikipedia), the Ojibwe name for Virginia creeper is mnidoo-biimaakwad bebaamooded and in the Mohawk language she was called kontiráthens.

Another distinction between poison ivy and Virginia creeper are the berries. The berries of poison ivy are dirty toilet bowl white. The berries of the Virginia creeper are a velvety midnight blue — think of the sky at night when you go camping, but without the stars. In contrast to the often drooping, listless clusters of poison ivy berries, the Virginia creeper offers her ripe berries at the ends of tiny magenta stalks. To birds the berries must seem like marshmallows at the end of a stick; it is a go-to winter food for many of them. The Virginia creeper’s generosity does not extend to humans. She wards us away from her berries, making them toxic and possibly fatal to us.

In addition to growing on walls and sprawling on the ground in our abandoned areas and neglected buildings, Virginia creeper has also made herself part of the habitat at Bush Terminal Park, where she has claimed fences there as prime real estate. She can also be found sunning herself on the rocks at the jetty.

When she showed up in a community garden I’ve been volunteering at in Bush Terminal, sprouting in the shade of an elderberry, I decided to keep her in place. The garden did need groundcover after all. I planned to move her next to a fence later in the season. But just as this vine clings to walls and rocks, I learned that she also clings to her place in the soil. Later, I dug around the puny young vine only to discover that this little plant had spent the summer growing her roots downward rather than growing much above the soil. She had several roots spreading in different directions. I expanded the hole to seek their terminus and loosen their grasp in the earth, but the Virginia creeper held her ground. Her roots had no end that I would be able to find unless I dug up the whole garden, it seemed. The Virginia creeper stayed where she planted herself.