(Brambles, hedge bindweed)

Today I saw a bramble bush crouching in bright sunlight at the gate of a field. And suddenly I thought: what a marvellous contraption a bramble bush is! Almost the kind of thing dear old Professor Stonehouse would have made if he was still with us!

Out of the bramble’s plated body arced strong arms for grappling, hooked with thorns; arms that, once they struck land, would sprout searching knobbly toes to wriggle and get a purchase in the soil as the great bramble machine continued its progress across the country. But like those robots designed by children it had other kinder functions: I imagined the blackberries marked by childish arrows “food for birds and passers-by”. Meanwhile the leaves in the midday sunlight looked as hard and flat as tin, the older stems purpled, vinous, rendered square as if by the tautened tendons in a human arm.

The bramble seems a mathematical beast. Its leaves insist on 3s and 5s. As the bush throws out new arms, up sprout the leaves in a hard insignia of 3. The stems of the leaflets lengthen (putting out a few hair-like thorns for good luck) and make space for another two to grow, to make the complement of 5. No even numbers for the bramble (except by accident), just spiky odds.

A different sight greeted me across the road. An elder tree was shrouded in hedge bindweed. The bindweed had climbed over the top of it, covered it in a thick green cowl, and hung down at the edges like fillets of moss on a dripping green riverbank. Questing tendrils curved up into the air, swaying with insect inquisitiveness. What a picture the elder and the bindweed made together! The thick clusters of elderberries hung down, dark purple, shadowed in black among the elder’s narrow leaves, which were already starting to curl round like paper left in the sun. Next to them were the hundreds of heart-shaped shields, large and small, of the bindweed. What victories were those shields hung up to celebrate? What conquests? Here and there on the great mat of green the white convolvulus flowers floated, a cross between gramophone trumpets and the proclaimed innocence of lilies. Clad in white dresses, they were like Arthurian maids who traipsed among the spoils of some great conflict, and seemed all unwitting of the part they had played in causing it.

On each side of me was a plant intent on conquest, but, oh! by what different means! The bramble seems to live in a world of pickets and escarpments, spades and trenches; while the bindweed – like some sinuous and utterly not-to-be-trusted pre-Raphaelite lady – aims at its goal by wrapping its body close to another, its tender insinuations soon growing tenser. Good luck to both of them, I say!