Consumed, Slowly, From the Inside

I spent two days recently clearing a backyard with an excavation team up in Collaroy Plateau. Banana trees, years of dead leaves stacked at the base of them, a fence that had given up some time ago, brickwork that needed to come out entirely. Hard, straightforward work, where you can see exactly what you're removing and exactly why it needs to go. Then there was the wisteria. Something that I’d never come across in general, not just the world of construction.

It is worth being specific about what wisteria actually does, because the word itself carries none of it. The vines don't just climb, they twine, counter-clockwise, with a torque that tightens as the plant grows, which means the longer it's left, the more force it's exerting on whatever it's wrapped around. Around a young tree this is eventually fatal. The vine doesn't poison anything, doesn't need to. It just tightens, year after year, while the trunk keeps trying to grow outward against a restriction that never loosens, until the tree is girdled and dies from something that looks like nothing at all happened to it.

This particular wisteria had been left long enough to do all of it. It hadn't just climbed. It had found a structure and methodically built itself around every available point of contact. The pipe, the wire, the post, the root, all with the same twisting motion repeated, until the whole thing looked less like a plant and more like something assembled. It had gone through the chicken wire and locked itself into the mesh so completely that wire and vine had become a single material. It had found every gap in the fence palings and used each one as an anchor point, so that pulling out one length meant the fence moved with it. It had gone underground in places, runners spreading out from the base looking for the next thing to climb, and where it found root systems it had started on those too, slow and patient, no urgency required because it had nothing but time. Two days of work and we were still finding more of it, under brick, behind a downpipe, wound three times around a stake that had been driven in to support something that no longer existed.

None of this is unusual for wisteria. This is just what it does, reliably, given enough time and enough inattention.

It also has one of the most beautiful flowering displays available to a temperate garden. Cascading, fragrant, photographed constantly, planted deliberately because of how it looks rather than what it does. Nobody puts wisteria in because they want a structural parasite. They want the arbour covered in purple in spring. The behaviour is not a known trade-off people accept for the beauty. It's a fact that mostly goes unconsidered, because the beauty is what's visible and the tightening is not.

This is the actual problem, and it's bigger than gardening. We treat appearance as a reliable proxy for danger, when there's no real reason it should be. Something dangerous that looks dangerous gets dealt with immediately and without debate. Nobody hesitates over a visibly thorny, ugly, aggressive weed. The entire alarm system we run on is calibrated to the visual register of threat: ugliness, aggression, obvious hostility. Anything without those signals gets a default pass for as long as it keeps presenting the pleasant version of itself.

This means the actual damage in gardens, rarely comes from what looks dangerous. It comes from whatever was pleasant enough, for long enough, that nobody applied scrutiny to what it was actually doing while it looked that way. The colleague everyone is fond of. The arrangement that feels generous on the surface. The charm that exists specifically because charm disarms the exact instinct that would otherwise catch the problem early, while it's still a problem you could pull out with one hand instead of two days and a mattock.

The wisteria didn't do anything wrong. It did exactly what wisteria does, patiently, for years, while everyone admired it.

That's not really a flaw in the wisteria. It's a flaw in waiting for something to look dangerous before you take it seriously, and it is, on the evidence of how much damage gets done by things that never once looked the part, a fairly expensive flaw to keep having.