I was doing a bit of work this morning - staring out of the window. I have a bay tree in a pot quite close to the garden fence, and the fence is covered in ivy. Heavily covered. I last trimmed the ivy in August, I’d guess. And there is ivy growing into the bay tree’s pot.
I can see what it’s doing. It’s like that film with Sandra Bullock - a recent one, so her face looks strange but you can’t quite put your finger on it - and every time she goes to sleep she wakes up in the future, or the past, depending on the one she was in yesterday, but anyway she keeps looking at things
Giddy with delight, seeing what’s to come.
The image of the dead, dead ends in my mind.
Wrong thing. That’s MGMT. Look, the thing is, the ivy is going to get hold of the trunk. It’s going to get hold of the trunk.
I caught a bit of the nature programme about plants that was on the BBC recently. The Green Planet. It’s narrated by David Attenborough. He’s still going. Like a Bowhead Whale. They live for potentially beyond 200 years, have a mouth that opens as wide as a third of its body length, and they sing, a lot. Imagine if David Attenborough opened his mouth to a width that’s a third of his height and sang. Like an Aphex Twin video but worse.
But the amazing thing about that nature programme about plants is that it features a lot of time lapse film showing how plants move. You can watch months of time passing in a few seconds. Like Sandra Bullock in something else, not the one I mentioned before, a different one. Or like that scene from the 1960 film of The Time Machine where the inventor is trying to escape to the past but he goes the wrong way and he watches a dead morlock rot away to bones and then dust. Its face falls off and eye falls out. The sort of film that made an impression on me as a child, like that bit in Raiders of the Lost Ark where the nazi leader’s face melts. That’s not time travel though. It’s the wrath of God.
Plants that creep or climb are reaching out, just gripping what they find. Some grow towards the scent of the plant that they’re going to strangle. Others coil or lay down roots just because they connect with something else. Some plants cling to another plant’s stalk and then the next and from that to another, and it saves its own energy, while it rides the stalks it’s caught into the light.
Here’s where I’m going: the days are getting longer, and I need to trim the ivy.
Have a good weekend, for tomorrow.