Hedera Helix

bio:species:hedera_helix

Hedera helix — common ivy. Araliaceae, order Apiales. Characters: an evergreen woody climber that holds to bark, brick and stone with short adventitious rootlets along the stem — it grips, it does not twine and it does not tap the host for sap; and it bears TWO kinds of shoot. The juvenile climbing shoots have the leaf everyone pictures: dark, glossy, three- to five-lobed, pale-veined. The adult flowering shoots, produced only once the plant reaches light, have no rootlets, stand out from the wall, and carry unlobed oval leaves — then greenish umbels of nectar-rich flowers in autumn, late enough to be one of the last things open, and black berries the following spring. Setting: woodland, hedges, old walls, rock faces. Range: Europe and western Asia; widely planted and naturalised. Naming: helix, a spiral or twist. The two leaf forms were long enough taken for two plants that the difference has its own name: heterophylly.