They are so tiny but they give me such enormous joy! I can sit in my favorite chair with my knitting and I have only to glance up and I can see -- colour!
I bought some Hyacinthus orientalis in a blue, and Primulas in pink and yellow. I'll have to dig again for the actual varieties as they came from the garden centre with only generic labels. The ivy is a variegated one I found in the woods and dug up. Engish ivy is a garden escapee here on the Sunshine Coast as it is in much of the Lower Mainland of BC and is very invasive, so I feel not a twinge of guilt in digging it up. I will not allow it to get full grown and set seed.
There are many ways of looking at the problem. The purists would have you stick to only native plants. Others will leave a bit of room for horticultural varieties that aren't considered thugs and unlikely to survive without a gardener coddling them along. And then at the other extreme are those who say Mother Nature mixes it up all the time and we might as well let them duke it out.
English ivy does only seem to be found especially in partial shade in second growth forests and disturbed soils. I have yet to see it in the middle of the deep shade of the coastal forests, but I wonder. Because it is so prevalent the Vancouver area, especially on parts of the North Shore, I have participated in restoration meet-ups to try to get rid of it.
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