"Time Passes"

Of course that's a To the Lighthouse reference - to that whole central impersonal section.

"So with the house empty and the doors locked and the mattresses rolled round, those stray airs, advance guards of great armies, blustered in, brushed bare boards, nibbled and fanned, met nothing in bedroom or drawing-room that wholly resisted them but only hangings that flapped, wood that creaked, the bare legs of tables, saucepans and china already furred, tarnished, cracked. What people had shed and left — a pair of shoes, a shooting cap, some faded skirts and coats in wardrobes — those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated; how once hands were busy with hooks and buttons; how once the looking-glass had held a face; had held a world hollowed out in which a figure turned, a hand flashed, the door opened, in came children rushing and tumbling; and went out again. Now, day after day, light turned, like a flower reflected in water, its sharp image on the wall opposite. [...]"

I don't recollect Woolf writing about ivy here, but if she were to have done - rather than the less green, and definitely less vegetative light - it surely would have crept round the doorframe and entered, just like this.

This is not unique to a more-or-less, or soon-to-be abandoned house: my parents used to like the inside/outside effect that the ivy created - but how, it seems like a rapid invasion of the wild.