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Partly cloudy skies. Low 42F. Winds SSW at 5 to 10 mph.

Barbara Tacker’s home is covered in Boston Ivy and may cause a double take when driving by her home off of Wabash Avenue. It can be seen here Sept. 16.

The northside of Barbara Tacker’s home shows the evidence of rapid Boston Ivy growth on Sept. 16.

Barbara Tacker has to occasionally trim the ivy that covers her home and other parts of her property.

A photo of Barbara Tacker’s home from the 1970s definitely shows less Boston Ivy than it does now.

Barbara Tacker bought her home from her grandparents, Eli and Ellen Fielding, who can be seen in a photograph from 1965 in Tacker’s home on Sept. 16.

Ivy covers the windows in front of Barbara Tacker’s kitchen sink on Sept. 16.

Barbara Tacker’s home is covered in Boston Ivy and may cause a double take when driving by her home off of Wabash Avenue. It can be seen here Sept. 16.

The northside of Barbara Tacker’s home shows the evidence of rapid Boston Ivy growth on Sept. 16.

Barbara Tacker has to occasionally trim the ivy that covers her home and other parts of her property.

A photo of Barbara Tacker’s home from the 1970s definitely shows less Boston Ivy than it does now.

Barbara Tacker bought her home from her grandparents, Eli and Ellen Fielding, who can be seen in a photograph from 1965 in Tacker’s home on Sept. 16.

Ivy covers the windows in front of Barbara Tacker’s kitchen sink on Sept. 16.

The possibilities that can come by turning your car off of a frequently used roadway, down a little side street, and then around an unfamiliar corner or two, perhaps just for the fun of it, can occasionally lead a person to spot head-spinning sights: maybe a bizarrely shaped tree or a “Fantasyland” treehouse, perhaps a flamboyant garden or a unique landscape with striking character. A lucky person might happen across a one-of-a-kind, eye-catching house that startles his or her eyes into looking at it again and again, maybe exclaiming, “Oh my gosh!” or some more colorful phrase.

From spring to fall, one such attention-grabbing gem exists somewhere on the north side of Terre Haute — Barbara Tacker’s “Ivy House.” In season, Boston Ivy completely drapes the exterior front and side walls of Tacker’s home. Forever creeping, the ivy has made its way to all parts of Tacker’s home bearing its bright-green, three-pronged leaves that can be the size of a human hand. A scattering of pea-sized blue-green fruits similar looking to grapes occasionally dangle amid the leaves.

The only part of Tacker’s house not completely ivy-covered is the back siding, but ivy is creeping up the back eves of the Tacker house and along the wooden siding of her back porch deck. Perhaps next year, the house’s back exterior wall will become fully ivy-covered; meanwhile, Boston Ivy methodically inches its way east along the wood fencing that Tacker has bounding the north side of her property.

Tacker’s ivy house has been in her family for a long time, but it has not always been covered with ivy. Her grandparents bought the home in 1965. She bought it from them and moved into it with her former husband where they raised two daughters.

Tacker is a good housekeeper. In the interior of her home, she displays several artistic flourishes, and in her backyard, near the rear deck, an unusual-looking long-leafed sumac tree adds a further note of distinction to her property. A yard service regularly maintains Tacker’s front and back lawns.

“Sometimes it’s a bother trimming the ivy away from the metal grill covering my front door windowpane, my mailbox, and the Trib-Star delivery box,” said Tacker, “but I love my ivy. I trim it where necessary. I have a good pair of scissors. …

“I guess I’ve got a thing for ivy. When I was a girl, sometimes I would go around town on drives with my parents. I recall how much I liked a particular house in the east suburbs of Terre Haute that had a lot of ivy on its walls.”

Tacker said that in the past few years, people have occasionally dropped by her place and offered to get rid of the ivy for her, but she always sends them away.

In the late 1970s, Boston Ivy made its first appearance creeping along the outer walls of her house starting at its southwest corner facing the street. In 1988, Tacker and her former husband contracted with a man to eradicate the ivy. He dug a trench to uproot the vines and cleared out the ivy, which did not return for a while. In these years, after Tacker finalized her divorce, the ivy reappeared on the southwest corner of her house and began creeping north and east along her house’s siding and even partway across the roof. By the early 2000s, her home was well on its way to being ivy-covered again.

“The siding on my house is old brown stuff that doesn’t look all that good,” said Tacker. “Many years ago, I wanted to get new siding on my house, but that’s expensive. My ivy now covers my home for a lot of the year.”

For having so much ivy on her home, Tacker has not had major problems caused by it, but for a couple years a hive of yellow jacket bees did lodge themselves in her ivy. She got rid of them by squirting chemicals that did not hurt her ivy.

“Sometimes it gets dark inside my house because ivy hangs down over my windows,” Tacker said, “but I’ve gotten used to it. My house lights work just fine.”

Tacker does not know how the ivy first made its way onto her property or why it returned. To explain ivy’s appearance in her life in her own way, she points to a small outdoor yard ornament of an angel that sits near her back deck. “One day somebody came onto my property and put that angel down. I don’t know who did it or why.”

The Boston Ivy cloaking Tacker’s abode is the same kind of ivy that has made the Chicago Cubs’ baseball team’s Wrigley Field a revered national landmark, renowned for its outdoorsy beauty since the ivy was introduced on its outfield wall just in time for the 1937 World Series.

Many plant historians believe Boston Ivy (Parthenocissus Tricuspidata, classified as a member of the grape family) was first introduced to Europeans and Americans by British botanist John Gould Veitch, who is credited with discovering it in the 1800s on Mount Fuji in Japan. After Veitch’s supposed discovery, not long after he brought it to England, a Boston Ivy sample made its way into an American garden. Soon it started creeping up and along the walls of American buildings, becoming especially noted for its appearance on college buildings in the Northeast. Its popularity grew for a couple of reasons. Although Boston Ivy looks like traditional ivy, being a member of the grape family, it has some differences. The ivy does not attach itself to building walls with invasive rootlets; instead, it adheres to various sidings by essentially gluing itself to them with the adhesive forces of its sticky discs. Another positive for ivy-draped homes, it acts as an insulator, so during the summer, people with ivy-covered homes may save on air conditioning costs.

In the fall, the leaves on my ivy turn red like tree leaves,” said Tacker. “Then they wither and crinkle up and my old brown siding can be seen, but I know my ivy will be back come springtime.”

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