An alien invader.

Byline: DIANE DIETZ The Register-Guard

IT SOUNDS at the outset like a B-grade horror movie, but members of the Native Plant Society, Emerald Chapter, will swear that it's all too true.

Alien plant life is attacking Oregon, and if left unchecked it will topple the tallest Doug fir and bury the entire natural landscape in waxy green vegetation, society members say.

The evidence is clear, obvious to the naked eye, and unsuspecting Lane County residents would be convinced, if they only went outside and looked, they say.

English ivy - known by the Latin name Hedera helix - is bound to take over every place a human being isn't there to pull, claw or beat it back.

And it looks an awful lot like a losing battle at Eugene's Hendricks and Skinner Butte parks, where the hillsides are blanketed with the leafy stuff.

Despite a decade of ivy pulls, plant enthusiasts have cleared only four of 45 infested acres at Hendricks Park and only two of 40 acres at Skinner Butte.

Now, groups such as the Native Plant Society and the No Ivy League are battling their foe on the political front. During the past three years, they've persuaded the state to create a plant quarantine list, place English ivy on the list and - in a major victory this winter - persuaded the Oregon Department of Agriculture to pass a rule making it illegal to propagate, transport, sell or buy English ivy.

Now, they're turning their attention to you, the general public. They'd like you to rid your yard of all varieties of ivy - and hundreds of other imported plants. So expect to hear a lot about the superiority of native plants in coming years.

"A new way of thinking has begun," says Stanton Cook, a retired University of Oregon biology professor and native plant enthusiast. "We ought to consider the consequences of moving plants all over the world."

The "green barbarian"

With ivy, the plant society has chosen a formidable foe. You'd be hard pressed to find a block in Eugene or Springfield without a fence post or chimney or embankment covered with its tangled vines.

That's because people like ivy - a lot. They carried it all the way from the Caucasus Mountains in Russia to western Europe, where it flutters on castle walls.

They took ivy along to the New World, hauled it west - and planted it in yards where they settled, including those on the fringes of Eugene- Springfield, next to forested areas where the ivy eventually "escaped" into the wild. Biologists noted its presence in the Willamette Valley woods by 1941, Cook says.

Ivy became the favorite plant of landscape professionals, who placed it on the banks of freeway overpasses, around warehouses, in parks - and even in the flowerbeds at Eugene City Hall, where you can see it still.

"It doesn't need much water. It doesn't need shade. And it doesn't need sun. It will grow in any soil condition," says Robin Hostick, a city of Eugene landscape architect.

Taking advantage of ivy's enormous breadth of adaptation, some professionals here and in other regions of the country are reluctant to give it up even now, Hostick says. It's their cheap and carefree solution, the "magic bullet" of ground cover.

English ivy spreads out over the land, overcoming all other plant life in its path, so an ivy bed requires little or no weeding - that was an attractive attribute for homeowners and maintenance crews.

But it's that very tenacity that earned English ivy the nickname of "green barbarian" once it outpaces the gardener's pruning shears and makes for the woods.

There, an ivy plant will drop a deep, drought-resistant tap root and then send its lead vine out across the forest floor, moving at the rate of 2 to 5 feet per year. Every 4 or 5 inches along the vine, the ivy plant drops tiny roots that exude a glue that attaches and propels it along the ground or up a fence, a house or a tree.

Meanwhile, the ivy is growing crosswise, too, sending out shoots in either direction perpendicular to the lead vine. The plants weave back and forth across one another, forming a thick green mat. "It's just like a fabric, a web of intertwined stems," Cook says.

When it's time to reproduce, the ivy goes vertical. About a foot up a house or a tree, it can set berries that attract birds, which plop the seeds on the ground as much as a mile away.

If the ivy finds no surface to climb, it will double back and climb itself, says Sandra Diedrich, whose eight-year campaign to remove ivy from Forest Park in Portland spawned the No Ivy League. It rises up like a green terror, hip deep in some places.

"It roots and roots and roots and roots and roots," Diedrich says.

No natural enemies

English ivy is growing out of control in 26 states, according to the national Plant Conservation Alliance, a group that includes federal officials, botanists and horticulturists.

But the plant is overwhelming forests in western Washington and Oregon, where the mild marine climate allows it to grow all year.

Here the English ivy is without the checks and balances of its native landscape in the Caucasus Mountains. Here, there are no bitter winters to nip its buds and restrain its ambitions.

Ivy doesn't have any natural enemies, says Dan Hilburn, administrator of the Oregon Agriculture Department's plants division.

"Nothing eats it," he says. "There aren't any holes in the leaves. It always looks healthy. It just spreads and keeps on going and going."

So the ivy tramples the forest floor, smothering the mosses, the delicate Miner's lettuce, false Solomon's seal, waterleaf and licorice fern. It snuffs out the fawn lilies and the trillium, and all the other wildflowers and grasses that bloom and please in the spring.

Gone with them are the forest life, the insects and critters that usually nest in the plants on the forest floor - including song sparrow, spotted towhee, orange crown warblers and dark-eyed junco.

Then, the ivy creeps up the trees - the oak and the fir - and it holds water in rainstorms, straining the trees with the weight, giving them greater "sail" in the wind and causing them to topple in storms.

Worse, it stops the trees from reproducing. The trees send their tiny seeds drifting to the forest floor, where they filter in between the ivy leaves and settle - and it's too dark and chilly under there for germination.

No seedlings can spring up to replace the old trees when they fall and rot.

"I'm not a rabid foaming-at-the- mouth type, but some of the things I've seen have really been chilling," Diedrich says. "I've been to places where the only thing alive is ivy."

That's the fear, Hilburn says. Oregon's forests will be transformed to acres and acres of monotonous "ivy desert."

Native plant advocates

But now comes a human force to challenge the ivy, and it's composed of people who are not to be underestimated. They're "die-hard botanists, thoroughbred botanist" and champions of the cause, Cook says.

These are people who appear green, delicate and studious on the surface - including scientists, who are intimate with the habits of tiny woodland plants, and who unself-consciously wear turtleneck shirts, berets and flower embroidery on their vests - but underneath they have a constitution of steel.

They consider themselves the watchdogs of the native plant community, and in this area, they've got clout.

They pushed for limits to the "Millennium Clothesline" public art project on Mount Pisgah because they didn't want participants trampling the rare Roemer's fescue at the proposed site.

They helped run the River Road area's annual Cruise-In classic car show out of Rasor Park to protect the lupine, yarrow and checker-mallow.

"We're listened to when we submit testimony," says Bruce Newhouse, a Eugene resident, botanist and president of the 1,000-member Native Plant Society of Oregon. "Most things go the way we like."

On the subject of ivy, they've racked up some impressive political successes. First, the native plants advocates persuaded city of Eugene departments - roads, parks, facilities - to swear off ivy as ground cover.

"At first, it almost seemed ridiculous not to continue planting it," says Louis Kroeck, the city engineering division's principal landscape architect. "In the last dozen years it has been a creeping awareness. It's the slow education of everybody."

Now, the city is poised to make it official and blacklist ivy.

Planner Neil Bjorklund is developing a proposal to create a plant database, which will put noxious plant warnings at the fingertips of all 1,400 city staff members.

Eventually, planners may regulate the types of plants developers use on private projects. "It's not an official goal," Bjorklund says. "We're looking at the internal side of it first."

For the first time last year, the city dedicated money - about $30,000 - to ivy removal.

But at the cost of $4,500 an acre, it would already take years - and millions of dollars - to make Eugene an ivy-free city.

"It's not an easy solution," says Jesse Cary-Hobbs, a city of Eugene maintenance worker, whose crew also tends to the ivy. "It's something we have to commit to as a society."

At the state level, meanwhile, the activists have gained even more ground.

The state Department of Transportation admittedly loved English ivy, grew their own in a state greenhouse and bought tons from growers.

In 1999, when the state remodeled the Interstate 105 interchange with Coburg Road, its contractor insisted on planting ivy on the overpass embankment - "much to the chagrin and disappointment of city staff," says Hostick, the city's landscape architect.

Now that's all changed, says Bette Coste, ODOT vegetation manager. "We absolutely will not plant it anywhere,"

Propagating English ivy is now illegal - native plant enthusiasts, largely from Portland and Eugene, made darn sure of that.

Under pressure from the No Ivy League and the Native Plant Society, Oregon became the first state in the nation to list English ivy as a noxious weed and then prohibit its trade.

When the ban went into effect on Jan. 28, nurseries burned or otherwise destroyed thousands of plants - although some are risking a civil penalty while they're waiting for their remaining stock to sell. The maximum fine is $10,000.

Native plant society members couldn't be happier about commandeering the state's regulatory guns in their war against ivy.

Although it doesn't get the ivy out of the woods, the quarantine means that the battle is seen as legitimate. It's no longer for the "ecofreaks" alone, Cook says. "It's in the mainstream now."

This is a major step forward, says Diedrich, the No Ivy League founder. "It's kind of like righteousness."

Establishing a precedent?

Pity the poor nursery owners who are caught in the crossfire in this war on ivy.

They're people such as Mary and Milt Decker, who've just celebrated their 43rd year in the nursery business they bought in their early 20s and built into a 10-acre success in Alvadore, northwest of Eugene.

For a quarter-century or more, they've propagated English ivy, growing and selling 300 to 400 flats a year, which they sold to the city, county and state as well as their retail customers - at $16.99 a flat or $1.99 an individual plant.

Mary Decker, a warm woman who wears white sneakers, a pastel pantsuit and a gold cross around her neck, eyed about 150 English ivy seedlings - the vestiges of a plant that helped build a life for her family.

"I don't have time to worry about that. I have so many other things to worry about," she says. "It's a nice cash crop, but we'll work on something else."

Besides, Decker says, she had her own skirmish with ivy after planting it on a fencepost two years ago.

"It plants itself on your house and leaves ridges where it tries to cling to the walls," she says. "I'm still trying to get it out."

The Oregon Association of Nurserymen chose not to oppose the state's decision to ban the sale of English ivy, Executive Director John Aguirre says.

Nurserymen know the aggressive properties of the plant, but they were spooked by the idea of allowing a precedent to get established in the fertile soil of urban environmentalism.

"Where does this stop?" Aguirre says. "What's disturbing isn't so much the regulatory process, it's more the fickle winds of public opinion, and when will an advocacy group again target another plant?"

The nurserymen's fears are justified. Banning English ivy was big, Diedrich says. But now ivy activists will push incrementally until all the non-native varieties of ivy are "bontana nongrata," she says.

Next, the plant society would like to talk about the butterfly bush, which is spreading to the river banks and squeezing out the native willows that the butterflies feed on in the larval stage.

The butterfly bush offers the insect empty calories, Newhouse says. "It's candy. It's superfluous," he says.

Then, what about lawns, the grass monoculture that's as much of a desert as an ivy field? "It's worthless. It's basically carpeting outdoors," Newhouse says.

In Newhouse's dreams, Eugene-Springfield homeowners would follow his example and mulch over their lawns and put in native mosses, grasses and berries.

Ninety percent of nursery stock would be propagated from plants native - not just to Oregon - but to the Willamette Valley, preferably the Southern Willamette Valley. He'd allow for a few supplemental exotic pleasure plants, tulips perhaps, as long as they were proven not to spread in the wild.

Aguirre, the nurseryman, says that would eliminate virtually all nursery stock.

"There's clearly a dividing line between gardeners who want a full palette of plants, and gardeners - you might characterize them as environmentalist - who are of the mind that only native plants should be used," Aguirre says.

Newhouse agrees.

`Yeah, if noxious weeds are on your `palette' it probably shouldn't be there,' he says. "I want the health of the ecosystem to take precedence over human aesthetics."

BEATING IVY

Plant experts offer no easy way to get rid of ivy. It has no natural pests, its waxy leaves resist herbicides, and poison strong enough to kill it will wipe out everything else around. The only alternative is to grub it out.

Cut from trees: Clip each vine at shoulder and ankle height. Pull what you can from the trunk. Ivy vines higher up will die without roots in the ground. This stops the vine from reproducing.

Don't be intimidated: Pick a spot in the mass. Get on your hands and knees, cut out a section and - starting on one end - pull and roll the mass like a big carpet.

Be careful: Delicately clip around the native plants that have managed to survive and lift the rolled mass over them.

Timing is important: In the forest, you don't want to pull ivy in the late winter and spring if there are any native plants at all hanging on. The young starts will be trampled. It is best pulled in fall after the rains start.

Make a long-term commitment: After initial pulling, annual follow-ups are needed to get the re-sprouts.

Check out these Web sites:

www.noivyleague.com (includes photo illustration on removal methods)

www.ci.eugene.or.us/pw/parks/hendricks/volunteer.htm

www.nps.gov/plants/alien/fact/hehe1.htm

GOOD PLANTS, BAD PLANTS

Most pernicious plants:

1. Himalaya blackberry (more correctly called Armenian blackberry)

2. Scotch broom (more correctly called Scot's broom)

3. Reed canarygrass

4. English ivy

5. Pennyroyal 

Good native substitutes:

1. Pacific serviceberry, a medium-size shrub that attracts birds and butterflies

2. Red flowering currant, good for hummingbirds

3. Checkermallow, a leafy plant that attracts butterflies

4. Woods or broadpetal strawberry, a low-growing plant that provides excellent ground cover

5. Mule's ears, a perennial that's also known as wyethia

Where to find them:

Lorane Hills Farm and Nursery, 344-8943

Balance Restoration Nursery, Cottage Grove, 942-5530

Doak Creek Native Plant Nursery, Eugene, 484-9206

Trillium Gardens, Pleasant Hill, 937-3073

Down to Earth, Eugene, 342-6820

Oregon Association of Nurserymen: Log onto www.nurseryguide.com and search the nurserymen's handy online "Directory and Buyers Guide," which features 25,000 plant listings, 3,500 varieties and the 500 growers who produce them.

City brochure: Get your copy of "Native Plant Alternatives for Landscaping" by calling 682-4800.

CAPTION(S):

Nathan Heldt, 11 (from left), Nathan Brockett, 12, and Perla Vazquez join other volunteers to clear ivy from Hendricks Park in February. PAUL CARTER / The Register-Guard Stanton Cook points out a plant on the floor of Hendricks Park that may survive now that the English ivy has been removed.