To say I have a love-hate relationship with ivy is too simplistic. Because one of the largest organisms in our garden is a much-valued ivy tod (bush), draped over the top of a decapitated 3m-tall cypress stump. Yet I have also had moments of despair, such as the day I realised ivy had choked out the canopy of one of our favourite holly trees, which has never truly recovered.

Come September I forgive ivy its relentless self-promotion and when I walked up the lane today, where it has also smothered a whole section of oak hedge, I fell in love with its imperishable emerald all over again. The flowering bushes at this spot swooned in invertebrate drone. Here in one 4m stretch of Hedera helix were colour, complexity, music and drama – all of it driven by those weird and completely unprepossessing ivy flowers.

Each globe of blooms begins as a spray of about 20 tiny lime balls on separate stalks arising from a terminal node. Later, these round buds elongate into a sort of cone topped by a nipple, from which peel back five green sepals. The whole structure, even before it opens, seems to be magnetic for feeding insects, which lick and chew the surfaces remorselessly. But finally the cone bursts open and out spring five crinkled stamens, smothered in pollen. That whole moment of vegetable sex is electrifying for insects and inspires the dense whine that now envelops me.

Centre stage are the gorgeous little solitary ivy bees, Colletes hederae, which were not named for science until 1993 and which have spread across southern Britain since they were first recorded in this country in 2001. Now they are commonplace in my parish.

A beewolf and and an ivy bee feed on the same plant. Photograph: Mark Cocker

Yet together with these beautiful vegetarian insects are a host of real killers. Philanthus triangulum is a very handsome solitary wasp, but it is noted as a predator that specialises in honeybees, on whose numbers it can have significant effect. It seems well named as the “beewolf”. Today, however, I notice for once the wolf lying down with the lamb, because the bee and beewolf are feeding on ivy side by side.