The queen consort of George V was consistent in her sense of duty and unswerving in how she expressed it. Crowned with dignity and corseted with confidence, at five feet six inches, Mary of Teck was the same height as the king, but they were called George the Fifth and Mary the Four-fifths. Of her many benefactions to Empire, not least, and perhaps most conspicuous, was her habit of removing climbing ivy from regal residences and public buildings. Her detestation of climbing ivy was a life-long obsession, quite the opposite of Queen Anne’s love affair with boxwood. Even in the dark days of the Blitz when she was billeted outside London in Badminton House, home of her niece the Duchess of Beaufort, and forced by wartime exigencies to reduce her private staff to fifty-two, Queen Mary led them in tearing down the ivy from the house and surrounding walls, like Samson bringing down the Temple of Dagon, with not a single hair out of place.
A few generations before then, ivy had become the picturesque fad for architecture, but only hid it, and also damaged the stones. There is no clear explanation for that fashion, no easier than explaining how our mostly clean-shaven Founding Fathers paved the way for a generation of bearded Civil War generals as hard to distinguish one from the other as Byzantine bishops. Perhaps it was because ivy gave a romantic air of antiquity, and ivied halls metastasized into the Ivy League. As fashions come and go, ivy has disappeared from buildings as fast as beards from faces.
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