The Kiwi Vine, Part 2
It’s a lovely summer day and I place two, bright pink children’s chairs under the male kiwi, a.k.a. “Mr. Show Off”. The chairs are plastic monstrosities; hand-me-downs to our daughter from someone, from somewhere, at sometime in the recent past. I will be very glad to part company with them as I am unsure of their stability and they are not to my taste. For now however, they are at hand and they match the male kiwi perfectly. They are cute and cheerful under Mr. Show Off’s graceful pink, green and white canopy. It’s nice and cool under there. I put a stump on wheels inside this living tent to use as a table. “The girls will love this” I think, smiling to myself.
Our daughter and her family arrive and “Grimble C” and “Grimble E” flit around the house and garden. Exploring eagerly, they are clearly relishing being uncaged from the confines of the pandemic. Our daughter goes straight to a lounge chair on the deck in a hat and sundress, tries to read and instantly falls half asleep in the drowsy sunlight. All mothers are like that when their elders take their children, but the pandemic has carved dark circles under the eyes of the parents in these last brutal years, especially working mothers like her.
“Grimble E!, Grimble C!”, I call loudly into the house. “Do you want to eat lunch in the Pink Palace?”
“Yes, I do!” says Grimble C.
“Me too!” says Grimble E.
“Well then, right this way” I say, starting to walk away.
“Can you find The Pink Palace?” I ask, as I lead them to the deck. They look to no avail. I let them get frustrated rather than bailing them out. Finally, I lift the living tent flap and usher them in. It’s hot and the shade is welcome. They love all the pink, especially the filtered light shining through the mottled pink leaves.
“Oh! Look at the cute, pink chairs!” says Grimble C and in her exuberance, promptly tips, then quickly rights the stump table. “Sorry.” I just smile.
Grimble E.’s chair slides right out from under her as I had foretold and I mentally mark the chairs as gonners in our next round of Swedish Death Cleaning.
“Later, we’ll play pirates. I make a very good pirate now, don’t I?” I say, lowering the tent flap and helping the girls settle in for lunch.
****
Actinidia kolomikta bears small, hairless kiwi berries and grows 10-15 feet each year. Their stems are tender in year one, whip-like in year two, and become woody and stiff in years three and beyond. Given half a chance, a single vine will overtake a tree or any other vertical support, in a thrice. Think kudzu but with fruit.
Audacious growth like this needs a structured approach to maintenance. A common attempt at control is an annual hacking, but this butchery only releases the lower buds from hormonal control, rendering both the human and the plant as harried and frustrated in appearance as if they had both stuck their extremities into electrical sockets.
I had had three goals for this project: 1) create a vertical, self-supporting privacy screen that was easy to maintain; 2) give the female kiwi the space she needed to reproduce abundantly; and 3) disentangle the heirloom climbing rose space on a lower, horizontal metal trellis where it would get more sun. If I succeeded, we’d have the privacy screen of Mr. and Mrs. Show Off on the left and right respectively, more fruit from the demure Mrs Show Off, and lots more of the spicy-sweet fragrance everyone loved from the heirloom rose below.
It’s always wise to let nature inform your gardening so I ran with the pattern of x’s and arches that Mr. Show Off himself suggested. He was too strong, wooden and crotchety to braid and twist, so last year I had forcibly bound his stems together with zip-ties-too-numerous-to-count.
After an experimental garden solution like this, it’s wait, watch and see, a.k.a. “Sleep, creep, leap”. This year, Mr. Show Off had rebounded as if nothing had happened. Sprouting new growth from the bare winter wood, it now flowed onto the deck once more.
****
“Definitely needs another haircut after the girls have gone”, I think to myself as I carry the plates in from lunch. The rose smells and looks wonderful now that it has the full sun. It’s long, fat thorns are as menacing and sharp as ever.
I rub my eyes as I come into the relative dark inside, and think back to the incident of last year.
“Well, I might have killed the kiwi”, I had said aloud, sitting on the toilet in my bloodied shirt as my son finished patching my eye, “but dead or alive, the trellis will be a nice shape.”
“Mom”, he had said, “for now, please just hold very still.”
… to be continued
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Cover image by: zoosnow, 2018, "Actinidia Kolomikta, Actinidia, Kiwi". Source: Pixabay
