First Tendrils

India · nature

The first new shoot on a climbing vine — leaves still pale and partly furled, tendrils reaching out into the air on either side, the green background dissolved into nothing.

There is a particular shape that climbing vines make when they first put out new growth — the topmost leaves still wrapped in their protective sheath, the stem just below holding out two or three smaller leaves at right angles, the tendrils reaching ahead into the air like the slow careful hands of a sleepwalker. They are looking for something to wrap around. They will find it.

I shot this in soft light against an unfocussed green background, the leaves still pale enough to show the veins through them. The whole frame has almost no contrast — just a thin vertical of stem, the small clutter of new leaves at the top, the two outstretched tendrils, and the wash of green behind. New growth on a vine always looks unguarded, almost vulnerable, even though the plant is in fact doing one of the most aggressive things in the garden. By next month this shoot will be a metre long, and the wall on which it has settled will start to belong, by stages, to the vine.

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