(bright music) >>The next time you're at your local hardware store and you're shopping for plants, don't be tempted by this.

This is just English ivy.

It used to be very in fashion, but now that we know better, we can do better.

It's very invasive, and it can do things like strangle and kill your trees.

This property sat vacant for quite a while before we acquired it, and this grand old maple tree has, unfortunately, suffered from the English ivy that is growing here.

The problem with English ivy is twofold.

Not only will it kill your tree, but it's also incredibly hard to eradicate, and it can take many years to do fully.

It's both parasitizing this tree and sapping nutrients from it, but it also grows out into the yard, and to fully eradicate all of these roots here that we have is incredibly time-consuming.

It can take many days the first go round, and you really need to be vigilant year after year to look for regrowth.

This is where you would start.

Try to get down to the base in an area where you're not going to have too much trouble working, and you're going to really try to make sure that you are cutting off all of the aerial roots that have grown up around this tree from the roots at the bottom at the base, and as you're cutting, you don't want to girdle the tree.

So we don't want to just haphazardly cut all the way around.

That can kill the tree in and of itself when you cut the bark all the way around.

An example of that would be when you are weed eating all the way around very young saplings that are only a couple years old.

That's something that is actually quite common for groundskeepers to accidentally do and inadvertently hurt the trees.

It'll cause those trees to suffer and die.

If you can see here, there is a really, really big cluster of vines from this English ivy.

(ax thunks) That is almost a job for a sawzall, (ax thunks) but you want to be careful not to damage the bark of the tree underneath here.

(ax thunking) Making sure that you have really good quality sharp tools is very important.

Statistically, you're more likely to be injured using a dull knife or a dull tool, so we make sure that we've got really nice sharp hori horis, pinking shears, and this will make your job easy in the long run compared to struggling with dull tools, so don't be tempted by English ivy.

If you do need to buy some English ivy, bring it home and pot it and use it as a house plant, but never plant it around the base of trees as ground cover because inevitably, no matter how hard you try to control it, something like this will happen, and it will just be completely out of control.

That being said, you can go to a local nursery and pick up things like wild blue phlox, green and gold, or running cedar, which will be great ground cover, and they won't destroy the trees in your yard or crowd out other plants.

I hope this helps and happy gardening.