Six Square Metres
April 2013
The Happy Wanderer
More than a year ago I planted a vine called a Happy Wanderer against the back fence in the lane that lies between the rear of my home and the car park of a McDonald’s Restaurant. I hoped it would grow to screen what I call my Andy Warhol view – multiple burgers and golden arches on the illuminated drive through menu.
I chose this species of vine (Hardenbergia Violacea for the technically minded) because in my previous garden – off the beaten track far, far away – it went nuts in the harshest conditions and cloaked all kinds of ugliness, such as an old shipping container used as a garden shed, and a rusty half buried water tank that sheltered my goats. I thought it was indestructible, and so imported it to this inner urban brick paved chapter of my life.
The Happy Wanderer did not live up to its name. It died. I am sure it really was dead.
I put the failure down to the towering gum trees that McDonald’s planted on the other side of the fence many years ago, in theory as a screen. They grew rapidly, leaving bare trunks at eye level and growing tossing, messy heads of leaves far above the Golden Arches. They sucked the water out of the soil for metres around. This, I concluded, together with my culpable neglect, was why my Happy Wanderer carked it.
All through winter, and then through a baking summer, the corpse of the Wanderer reproached me. Dead tendrils clung to the silly little white plastic trellis. I was too lazy to pull it out, and I didn’t give it a drop of water. I gave up on the back lane.
We are now living through the autumn flush, second only to spring as a time of everyday miracles. Plants that sulked through the heat suddenly put on a surge. The gardening world briefly stands on tiptoes before hunkering down for winter.
Yet I was shaken when two weeks ago, as I pushed my bike down the back lane, I saw a leaf on the Happy Wanderer. It had come back to life, somehow surviving the bone dry dirt, the lack of care, the baking temperatures. Each day now, there is a new leaf.
What does not kill me makes me stronger, said Friedrich Nietzsche. He is not my favourite philosopher, and I’d be prepared to bet he wasn’t a gardener.
What he said is clearly not true for cucumbers and aphids, for example. My fingered cucumber plants have survived a severe aphid outbreak this week with the help of my homemade garlic potion, but they are much weakened. No super cucumber has emerged from adversity. I’ll be lucky to get any cucumbers at all before the cold brings an end.
But the Happy Wanderer? It has no right to be alive. I am sure that it was in fact dead. Yet without the benefits of any photosynthesis or other means of support, its roots must have twined their away around those of the monster gums, burrowed under the McDonald’s drive-through bitumen, travelled far, and found water.
I don’t know if it will ever block my view of drivers ordering their thickshakes and fries. I no longer really care.
As I coddle my weakened cucumbers, spraying them each morning, smearing my fingers with aphid corpses, I can see the Happy Wanderer (what an anodyne name) ascending tendril by tendril.
I hardly dare to water it in case my care disrupts some crucial element of the miracle. I am a little frightened of it. It doesn’t need me at all.
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