Entangled Vines
If you are still entangled in a static system… there is a chance in this season to break free. It’s okay.
You can take a severe pruning.
Two years ago, I planted star jasmine behind my patio. It’s a climbing vine, evergreen, producing delicate white flowers in the spring that emit a strong and lovely fragrance. Odds are, if you live in the southern US, there’s a star jasmine in your yard already. It’s easy to grow, can endure our shallow mix of limestone and clay soils, and thrives in the extreme summer heat with just partial shade and a little extra water. A single vine costs about $10 and, given the proper placement and a structure to climb, will quickly grow to cover a five-foot square piece of fencing or a metal railing. In my case, it has entwined itself around a somewhat damaged bamboo shade that came with my lease. That was the plan.
The bamboo shade was not some easy to remove object from Target, but a heartier installation, directly bolted to the ceiling of the patio. It wasn’t coming down without a fight, though my first intention was to just replace it with a new version. Despite the somewhat decayed appearance of the shade, I liked it. I couldn’t help myself. It did something nice to the space with it’s weathered and natural appearance, something that I couldn’t quite name. I struggled to find anything quite the same color, or with the same loose density, that didn’t look like plastic, or that didn’t cost an unreasonable amount of money for something you put outside.
I knew from the start that it would eventually climb the bamboo shade, though I didn’t expect it to get more than halfway, given the flower bed is three feet below the start of the railing for the patio, and it’s another three feet to reach the start of the shade. I thought I could mostly train it through the metal railing of the patio and then let some vines weave into the blind as much as they wanted, to sort of mask its condition and create a nice effect. I rolled up the shade from the bottom and lashed it to the railing so that the added weight from the vine was negligible. I placed the two foot tall starter plant in the abandoned flower bed below and hoped a little added soil would be enough. It was. That prodigious little sucker has hit ten feet already.
Some of you are doing the calculus in your heads by now and you are very concerned about the structural integrity of this situation. Rightly so, but here’s the thing: I know the blind may break or have to be taken down. I know I started something that has an end point that may involve some painful pruning. It’s okay.
If the worst happens, and some wild central Texas thunderstorm shortens the life of my living patio shade, then the enmeshed growth will have to either be cut back or individual vines disentangled from the wreckage. It will likely just slowly break apart over time. It’s okay. This plant can take a severe pruning.
My life experienced such a pruning during the Pandemic. Your’s too, I’m sure. We are still groaning from the sharp change even 8 months later, with shocking headlines renewing our awareness of the threat. And yet I’ve seen thoughtful people from the very start express a consistent hope that this season would bear a different sort of fruit.
Many do not want the distracted, busy, performative, noisy consumerism that defined our pre-pandemic lives to return. They want to find in this pruning season a chance to break free from old, decaying structures. There are also many people fighting to return to what was, even before it is entirely safe, seeing a restoration of their old lives as the only desirable path. Most of us want a little bit of both.
Change is challenging for human beings. We feel a shock that makes us desperate to cling to the familiar yet we cannot fully escape that the world is not as it was, even if we are living lives that appear to be entirely the same. If you are still entangled in a static system, still clinging to a decaying structure from the days before the pandemic, I want you to know something: there is a chance in this season to break free. It’s okay. You can take a severe pruning.
What comes after will be all new growth.
