Plant-speak

Field Notes from Tessellations

Muehlenbeckia is the only species laid on my freezer-top desk that’s native — a tangled mess of vines, climbing over itself, non-linear, delicate leaves and stems, robust, vigorous, imposing, possessive. Echo of contour lines, longitudes and latitudes tangled up in each other, a geopolitical mess, soup, tangle. 

I found a palm-sized head of Queen Anne’s lace. Daucus carota always returns me to the field near the goat barn on the island, near where the piles of goat manure sat composting, fermenting. Palm-sized, fist-sized, large enough to punch a hole in your chest. Delicate, smelling of itself — wild carrot — of root vegetables and turned-over soil. Its seeds chewed carefully in past centuries to ward off pregnancy. Its multiple, delicate blooms, forming a circle, each tilted upward for the sun.

The banana passionfruit vine has waxy leaves and happy-looking blooms, three-sided pods hiding new buds, and small reaching vines curling into tight spirals. It’s climbing its way over the vegetation lining the northwest side of Goat Island road, the steep incline choked with eucalyptus and an array of vines, wildflowers, exotic and native trees: Norfolk pine, eucalyptus, wisteria. They speak of where they are situated: of the loop in the road, of the ditch so steep I could stand at the top and just reach the trailing end of the vine, usually higher off the ground and farther out of reach. They speak of the wild middle, the thicket, the tumbling, spilling-over grove, the ravine, the cliff-face, the steep hillside, of the places humans rarely venture. They are messengers from this place, from deep in the soil, from the canopy, from the dense and tangled understory, from the ‘waste places’, left to grow out of control, beyond the reach of roadside spray operations. 

I saw moth-plant today at the roadside (a noxious highly invasive weed) but its sticky sap put me off, stopped me from removing it. 

Tobacco weed / woolly nightshade, its leaves too dense and impenetrable to make a decent exposure. Thick, hairy, also smelling of itself, perhaps faintly of tobacco. A soft, green, velvety import, that spreads at a rapid pace over cliff-sides and hillsides and the edges of cleared land and bush. 

The Cape wattle, elegant where tobacco weed is gauche (inelegant), is soft-leaved. I could brush its dappled light-making leaves all over my body. Quick to lose its shape, first to turn clammy in the palm. First to be seen today but last to be collected, from a patch of young shoots at the roadside, near the tobacco weed and the moth plant. 

An unknown yellow-flowering weed I didn’t even do the dignity of exposing or identifying. Working with the French girl M yesterday I learned that the word for a weed en français translates literally to ‘bad grass’. 

The tight spirals of the Passiflora (Banana passionfruit), one for each three-fingered leaf, are springy, dense and tightly coiled. I want to look at it for a long time, lose myself in each tight turn. Vines are such rich metaphors: for endurance, collaboration, persistence, quickness, for not letting anything stand in one’s way, for privacy — doing the bulk of its growing under the dark sidelines of the canopy until at last bursting forth in exuberant bloom and giving itself away. 

As I pace the route through spring into summer, the plants signal to me. Their signals, at first discreet and easy to miss (in spring) are now insistent, bright, gaudy expressions of health and growth. Fecund. I envision the opposite season, the last push of blooms before fruit hang heavy, fall and decay and the vines die away to brown. What’s left of them waiting out the dark of winter, dormant, kept secret, safe, discreet. I feel sorry to have killed these off prematurely, to have interrupted their bright feast, their gorgeous curtains of….I’m getting lost. 

I did not ask their permission. I forgot. They remind me of this. I think they want to become art, but that is a very human conceit. I have injured them, ended them, to draw them into a new form. They are anxious about this. Each one has a rich, deep history. Today I feel the message ‘no more’. I’m at capacity. I’ve met their capacity. Now I drive deeper. I narrow to discover. Which species will make it to the wallpaper and why?  

Passiflora tarminia / banana passionfruit

Muehlenbeckia (species unknown)

Solanum mauritianum / tobacco weed or woolly nightshade

Likely Paraserianthes lophantha / Cape wattle