More Beach Drive trees coming down

| Environment | West Seattle news

At the bottom of a slope along the southern half of Beach Drive, those ivy-wrapped trees are posted for removal by the city at the end of this month. This has been a busy site — a mudslide in the December storm, a “vegetation-removal” project to the north a few months earlier, a tree from the west side of the street that came down and blocked BD in the December ’06 storm. The notice posted on the “No Parking” signs says these trees will be removed because they’re in “poor health”; we have been trying to reach the city Urban Forestry department (listed on the notice as a contact) to find out whether the trees will be replaced, but haven’t heard back yet.

Alice January 20, 2008 (1:28 pm)

Sad as I am to see more trees come down, I’m not surprised those are in poor health. English ivy literally chokes the life out of anything it covers. The experts at Dunn Gardens (www.dunngardens.org) in North Seattle tell me that those “in the know” classify English Ivy as a parasitic weed. It not only destroys trees but also causes mortar between bricks to eventually crumble. The moral of the story is, don’t let English Ivy grow on anything you value!

WSB January 20, 2008 (2:17 pm)

It’s really a bad idea to have ivy anywhere – given that birds will eat the berries and as nature takes its course, spread the seeds elsewhere, for effects like this. We learned about the invasive/parasitic nature of this ivy around the time we bought our house in the early ’90s; thereafter, we were quick to pull any ivy that turned up (luckily there wasn’t a “stand” of it anywhere) and so far we are ivy-free.

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