In summer, invasive vines consume the roadside trees of Pittsburgh. See them through car windows, bus windows. They ensnare houses, clothe them in elfin leaf and vegetative sinew. They shroud our patches of urban forest and hide them from the sun, turning Appalachian woods into deepest jungle. Behold these green masses of leaves and their speckled berries in shades of robin’s egg and orchid. Never mind the oaks and elms withering beneath the drapery.

But in winter, these vines appear to deaden. Don’t be fooled — they are only sleeping. They wait for spring, stolen sunlight, and warmth. The Deads display themselves as tangled woody ropes — no more than sticks –– so in winter, you can finally peek through the vines and see the trees they cage. The Deads and their arboreal prisoners make for a sad landscape, all the same gray-brown drab.

Porcelain berry is among an array of invasive vines to swallow Pittsburgh, along with wisterias, wintercreeper, wild grape, bittersweet, mile-a-minute, and English ivy. All are exotic to our landscape of greens and muted yellows and whites; instead, they are multi-colored and blue-berried with drippy lilac petals and fruit like little scarlet globes unfolding from golden shells. Uncontested in this new land, these vines grow quickly to average lengths of twenty feet, with some species extending to as long as ninety. All grow greedily, hungrily. It is these same vines that strangle trees, drag them to the earth, and provide channels for pests and disease to their branches. The vines’ most visible effect is the shade they cast when knotted and woven into sinister canopies that starve trees of sun.

These vines were introduced to the States as ornamental plants—as décor—in the 18th and 19th centuries, shipped in from foreign ecosystems in entirely different hemispheres of the globe. It was fashionable to boast unmistakably exotic flora in the unmistakably unexotic Midwest. It was the wealthy who could afford to adorn their houses and gardens with such ornamentals, so these vines took on new meaning as a status symbol for those who owned them.

Little did those owners know, those vines would creep.

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For the Tito-Mecca-Zizza House on 5th Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Uptown, porcelain berry does not elevate its sagging walls or convey class: rather the vine actively tears it down. The house only just became a historic site in 2022. For years, this 19th century goliath went uninhabited, and now it is uninhabited still, even though the city owns it. Without any people—people who could pay to manicure their house’s green walls, that is—the vines have moved in. Porcelain berry entombs what once must have been a pretty house, red with a turret and a spacious yard. In winter, the Deads writhe their way around that turret, up the house’s sides, and through the bramble of the house’s yard. One can only imagine the jungle that has sprouted within the house’s walls.

I imagined that jungle every time I passed it on my morning commute to middle and high school. I caught a city bus at 6:40 each morning that ran from my neighborhood of Squirrel Hill through the University of Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood and Uptown before reaching Downtown Pittsburgh. Half the year, I could only see its red form emerge from the shadows of a pre-sunrise city, but when my mornings grew brighter, I would locate its crumbling stairs, its brick walls, its turret—all obscured by vines—before my bus blew past. I wished on the vine-snared house before exams. I noted as its exterior changed with time: Once, someone covered the front porch with floor-to-ceiling black and white bubble letters, the door, with the round, blue face of a dog. There were times I convinced myself the yard looked less overgrown, as if someone had been taming it, but its wild foliage would always rebound.

I paid attention to the house mostly just to make sure it was still there each time my bus drove by. It seemed equally plausible that it could disappear, swallowed whole by the Deads.

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The houses in the private road labyrinth on the hill dividing the Squirrel Hill and Shadyside neighborhoods of Pittsburgh do not all scream old money; some of them whisper. Old money, as a rule, must be subtle to be convincing.

Of course, the houses themselves are all mansions and manors. You can pick out the new money houses by their modern designs jutting out toward the silent, tree-lined streets. They are loud, red and angular, louder than the unpeopled, no-sidewalk Roads, Lanes, and Terrace. The only people on these roads are from other streets, here to walk their dogs. Passing through these streets as a kid, I was convinced that I would get in trouble for walking on somebody else’s streets and staring at their pretty houses; I wasn’t meant to be there. I dreaded the moment when we’d be caught by that somebody, but that moment never came.

In winter, the vines in the city turn into Deads. But the ivy that covers some of the houses here remains green. English and Boston ivies are evergreen. They are fashionable. They are intentional. The vines on these houses were planted, then guided by trellises, twist ties, and paid hands. Vines like porcelain berry and mile-a-minute are considered invasive to the States and are not sold as carelessly as before, but these reconsiderations have not touched the ivies. While the rest of the city decays for the season, houses with such ivy stay lush. Thanks to the green.

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These evergreen vines render the homes they cover even more ancient than they are. Ivy—even though it can grow up to ten feet per year—conveys age, status, even immortality.

This type of cultivated decay can be seen in the English countryside—coating castles—but also on our college campuses. Think: Ivy League. Think: Princeton. Think of the vines that swath Nassau Hall, the Old Graduate College, East Pyne, Holder, and Foulke. Even Whitman—built in 2004—grows its own vines. They are scraggly and only reach the first-floor windows of Wendell Hall, but give them a few years and they will have enveloped the whole Pyne Drive-facing wall. Serving the same purpose as Whitman’s Collegiate Gothic architecture, a few artfully-placed vines age the residential college way beyond its years. Even our oldest buildings on campus are modeled after far older ones in Oxford and Cambridge. Much of Princeton’s architecture conveys a sense of power and authority just by imitating ancient buildings, making us believe that Princeton, too, has existed for ages—and will exist for ages to come.

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I see Pittsburgh everywhere I go, constantly superimposing my city onto new surroundings. I cannot help but draw connections here at Princeton; there are so many obvious ones to make, like the lake named after Pittsburgh’s local steel magnate or the chemistry building that bears the same name as our largest city park. But just as the Pittsburgh connections come to mind, so too do the connections to the Deads.

The first time I truly noticed the Deads in my city, I was taking a new bus route. The bus uses the Martin Luther King Jr. East Busway, this hidden road system just for buses and emergency vehicles. The novelty of this secret route thrilled me, and I kept my face pressed to my window the whole ride as this new world grew around me: a hillside wall that ascended on one side was streaked with century-old soot and newer paint; train tracks followed the curve of the Busway on the other side; past them stood another hill, forming an urban canyon. Houses clustered at the tops and sides of the hills, but before, during, and after they appeared, there were trees.

This was winter, and here the Deads showed themselves in full force. Porcelain berry, creeper, bittersweet, maybe even some wilted ivy. The vines were as thick as tree limbs in places and spindly in others. They spread over the trees and bushes in a gauze of wooden cobwebs. It was hard to tell vine from branch amid the jumble of the Deads: dormant vines, soon-dead trees, and, up the hills, houses the Deads would reach or had gotten to already.

The vines on Nassau Hall, on the other hand, will remain as green and lively as the ivy on the houses I walk my dog past in Pittsburgh. Their leaves will be trimmed, the building maintained, and Princeton will continue to look as stately and storied as ever. It feels odd to me to now have this association with what I’d previously viewed as the opposite side of the Deads: the manicured, intentional vines. For a good deal of Princeton history, it was even each graduating class’s task to plant new ivy to contribute to Nassau Hall’s emerald coat, making students not only complicit in this whole vine-growing business but active participants in it.

I feel a little like I am now standing in one of those houses I would walk by, watching through the house’s windows, waiting for someone to stop and stare, waiting for someone to notice my vines and wonder: How come they’re so green?