When a grape vine decides to invade your house, you can’t help take notice. Was this type of event the thing that inspired ‘The Day of the Triffids’ ? Watching a plant do something in a place it should really be doing it in is fascinating. When you stop and look at any plant, it is absolutely fascinating.

In mid July I popped into my spare loft room to get some 3D prints from the printer, and noticed something curious. The grape vine on the outside of the house had decided to come in. I am not sure if it was the extremely hot weather we had been experiencing or just the random nature of vines, but rather than chop it off I thought I’d leave it alone and see what happens. Now I have grapes growing in my spare room!

It was fascinating to watch. I wish I had set up a time-lapse shoot to see the rapid way it went from one side of the house to the other. Within the space of a month it had come in and reach the other side of the room. I am sure if I sat still long enough I could probably have seen it move.

Alone the way it shot off little tendrils (or feelers as I call them) to find out what it could grab hold of. This took my back to my O level biology days when we were told about Indole-3-acetic acid (IAA) in plants, and how it plays a major part in plant orientation. It feels its way along and communicates back to the main plant with directions.

Then, once reasonably happy with what it was attached to it started creating bunches of small grapes. The first one, right above my laser printer, soon juicied up and looked quite happy.

I love plants and marvel at the way you can take a tiny spec of a seed and watch it grow into something quite stunning. I am a computer man at heart, and to write a program that instructed a seed to turn into a tree for example, is way beyond what I, or potentially anyone, could do.

Each cell in any form of life is an engineering marvel. Any form of life has billions of these cells coordinating themselves to be the form of life that it is. When all this coordination comes together, makes its way into your spare room and delivers you some fresh grapes above your laser printer, it is a truly magical event. The funny thing is, you don’t think a bunch of grapes is anything as complex as a colour laser printer. Quite the opposite is true. The DNA code on its own in a cell of a vine is more advanced that the firmware in the laser printer. Yet when a colour print comes out, I still marvel at the engineering and engineers that made that HP printer.

If the tendrils reach out towards the printer and start pushing the buttons I might have to draw the line there though. 🙂

Go on. Put your phone down. Sit quietly with any plant you choose and think about it.