Culpeper placed ivy under Saturn. Its clinging habit and its unfailing green made it, across European tradition, an emblem of fidelity, attachment and undying affection, the plant that holds fast and never fades, and it was woven into wedding wreaths for that reason. Paired with holly, it belongs to the midwinter greenery of the northern year, holly taken as male and ivy as female in the old carols. It carries a double edge: faithful and enduring, but also parasitic and funereal, planted on graves as a sign of life persisting past death. A single evergreen vine thus binds together wine, faithfulness, marriage and the enduring green of winter.
Ivy flowers unusually late in the year, from September into November, when almost nothing else is in bloom, making it one of the last significant nectar sources available to bees, hoverflies and other insects before winter; the plant's ecological value at exactly the season it is gathered as midwinter greenery is a genuine natural historical fact that sits alongside, rather than explains, its much older symbolic reputation. Ivy also marks a specific date in Irish political memory: Ivy Day, the sixth of October, commemorates the death of the nationalist leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, and supporters traditionally wore a sprig of ivy on that day, a nineteenth-century political use layered onto the plant's much older funerary and evergreen symbolism.