What it means
Ivy grows where other plants give up: up walls, over ruins, through winter. Ivy people are said to have the same endurance. Life often hands them more than their share of setbacks, and they keep climbing anyway, finding support where they can and holding on. They tend to be loyal, compassionate and drawn to spiritual questions. They often understand other people's troubles because they have been through their own.
Strengths
Persistence, endurance through hard times, loyalty, compassion, and a spiritual steadiness that others lean on.
Challenges
Clinging too tightly to people or situations, seeing themselves as the underdog, finding it hard to let go, and quiet resentment when their loyalty is not returned.
Ivy dates and Ogham letter
Ivy runs from September 30 to October 27 (28 days). Its Ogham letter is Gort, the letter for the sound G. The dates come from the tree calendar Robert Graves set out in The White Goddess (1948): thirteen 28-day months named after Ogham letters in his Beth-Luis-Nion order, plus one spare day, December 23. It is a modern system inspired by the Ogham, not a calendar recorded from the ancient Druids, and scholars think only some of the Ogham letter names first meant trees. On the Western calendar, Ivy starts in Libra and the Sun moves into Scorpio around October 23, so roughly the first 23 days are Libra Suns and the last 5 are Scorpio.
The ivy in folklore
Ivy flowers in autumn, later than almost anything else, and its nectar feeds bees and other insects when most food has gone. It spirals as it climbs, and Graves linked it to the ivy-wreathed god Dionysus and the wild autumn revels held in his name. The Ogham letter Gort probably first meant 'field' or 'garden', and medieval scholars later attached it to ivy.
How Cosmic Array reads it
Your tree depends only on the day and month you were born, so the year and birth time don't change it. The Architect blueprint shows your Celtic tree next to your Chinese animal, Mayan sign and Egyptian deity, and its written synthesis can set the tree against your Western Sun, Moon and Rising.