City arborist Laurie Reid recalled a report of a fallen tree her team responded to last week as Tropical Storm Debby passed through the Carolinas. The tree was long dead.
“It looked like a living tree because it was perfectly green,” Reid said. “But it was just a very dead tree completely covered in ivy.”
The city of Charlotte received 207 calls since Thursday. After May’s heavy storms, the city received over 400 calls. Reid says it could have been fewer — if more landowners took better care of their trees, including removing ivy.
Healthy mature trees provide benefits to the surrounding community, such as creating habitat and shade, sequestering carbon and controlling erosion. But when invasive vines take hold, tree health declines.
Reid heads up Charlotte’s tree maintenance crew, which manages trees in the city’s rights-of-way. Over 60% of the sites the team visited since last week’s storm were on private property. The city gets involved when those trees fall onto public property like roads.
A couple of days before the storm, TreesCharlotte arborist Heather Brent helped lead a workshop to remove invasive vines such as English ivy, Kudzu and wisteria from trees at a church and home in the McCrorey Heights neighborhood, just northwest of uptown.
These vines harm trees in a few different ways depending on the species. Many problem vines quickly creep up trees, covering them completely and reducing the amount of light the host tree can photosynthesize. Wisteria is an example of a vine that wraps around a tree and constricts it through a process called girdling. All these conditions prime a tree to fall during a bad storm.
“The other thing that it does is it adds a lot of weight to the tree,” Brent said. Vines collect water, and that extra water can get heavy quickly, especially if it starts to freeze in the winter. That extra weight can also cause problems for trees during strong winds.
Reid said thick English ivy can act like a sail, billowing in the wind and pulling the tree down.
Brent said many of the vines come from homeowners planting on their own property.
However, there are native options available at stores when it comes to creepy, crawly plants. Many species of vines have evolved in North Carolina to coexist with trees and shrubs without killing them. There are many native vines, like Virginia creeper and trumpet creeper, that don’t outcompete other endemic species.
Matching grants for ivy removal are available through the Keep Charlotte Beautiful program.
