The Ivy

The Ivy is the eleventh tree of the Celtic year, and like the Vine before it, it is a climber, and the calendar waves it through anyway. In the old tradition ivy stood for resurrection and for the green that will not quit through the winter, and if you were born under it you were planted with that stubbornness. You find a way up. You find a way round. You keep hold of what you have decided to keep.

The Vine ends on 29 September, so a birth on 30 September is an Ivy, the very first day of the month. The dates are fixed every year and every day belongs to one tree, so there is nothing to work out.

The tree itself

Ivy grows by holding on. It climbs a wall, a trunk, a fence, whatever will take its weight, and it goes up in a slow spiral, putting out small roots along the way that grip the surface. Its waxy leaves stay green all winter and its dark berries feed the birds when nothing else is fruiting. Once it is established it is very hard to get rid of. Gardeners curse it and poets love it, often the same person. It has long been tied to memory, to attachment and to the loyalty that does not release.

Who you are

You are tenacious. Once you have committed to a person, a project or a goal, you do not let go easily, and that is both your great strength and the thing that gets you into trouble. The Ivy does not uncling without a serious reason, and even then it takes its time.

You are adaptive. Like the plant that climbs whatever surface it is offered, you adjust to the conditions you find yourself in. Where another person sees a dead end, you see a wall to go up, or round, or through. Unfavourable circumstances slow you down. They rarely stop you.

You carry deep emotional memory. Things that happened long ago stay vivid for you, the people, the rooms, the exact words. This gives your life a continuity other people envy and it also means you carry luggage other people have long since put down. Both are true at once, and knowing that is half the work.

Strengths

The first gift is persistence. In my experience the difference between the people who got there and the people who did not is very often just the willingness to keep going through the long dull middle. You are built for the middle. It is a plain gift, and it is the one that wins.

The second gift is loyal memory. Your long friendships and your long memories keep alive what lighter natures let fade. You are the one who remembers the anniversary, the old grievance that needs settling, the kindness from thirty years ago. Someone has to.

The third is reliability. Over time your steadiness becomes ground that other people stand on, and you may not realise how many of them are leaning on you until you count.

Challenges

The shadow is attachment that has stopped being good for you. The same holding on that keeps your good relationships alive can keep you in a job, a relationship or a belief long after it has stopped serving anyone. Ivy will cling to a dead tree as happily as a living one. The mature Ivy has learned to tell the difference, and to let go when letting go is the loving thing. This is hard for you. It is also the main lesson of the sign.

The other shadow is merging. The Ivy's attachment can become a loss of boundary, where you can no longer tell where you end and the other person begins. Good boundaries are what make the attachment healthy, and a wall with ivy on it still needs to be a wall.

In love and work

In love you are profoundly loyal. The people you love have your attachment through conditions that would scatter a lighter bond. Family, old friends and long relationships tend to last a lifetime with an Ivy, and the people inside that circle know they are held.

The difficulty is release. You may find yourself staying in a connection that stopped nourishing you years ago because leaving feels like a betrayal of the plant's whole nature. Learning when to loosen your grip is difficult and important work, and you do not have to do it all at once.

In work you do best where the reward comes after years. Teaching, healthcare, long research, any career that asks for a decade of commitment before it flowers. Your ability to stay with what you started through the hard middle produces results that shorter efforts never reach. Give an Ivy something worth a long climb.

The Ogham letter

Gort is the Ivy's letter in the Ogham, the old Irish alphabet whose letters were notches cut along the edge of a stone or a stick, each named for a tree or plant. The glosses link Gort with the garden, with the enclosed field, with growth that comes from patient cultivation. A garden is a piece of ground someone has stayed with. That is the Ivy's letter: the tending that produces something lasting, and the climb that reaches what seemed out of reach because you did not stop.

Across the traditions

The Ivy month runs from 30 September to 27 October, so it overlaps Libra and then Scorpio in Western astrology, mostly Libra. The Libra page and the Scorpio page in The Signs give you the one who lives for connection and the one who never lets go, and between them they describe an Ivy rather well. The sign boundary moves by a day either way depending on the year, so if you were born around 22 or 23 October, check your chart.

Your tree is one layer in a full portrait, which reads thirteen systems side by side. Chinese Astrology, Vedic Astrology and Mayan Astrology each have their own section in the library, and Find Your Numbers and Signs will give you your tree alongside the rest when it arrives.

What are you still holding on to that let go of you a long time ago?

If you would like this read against your own chart, my readings are here.