The creeper remembers

 

I wrote about a creeper that seemingly flew high across a road and embraced another branch from another tree that was across the road.

https://hunterfiftyfour.blogspot.com/2026/08/creepers-leap-of-faith-30.html

Now, I noticed that the creeper was severed and there remained no sign of it as I visited the spot sometime last month. But today as I made my way through the spot again, I found that the creeper has again reinstated itself and had gone into another embrace with the branch of a tree across the road. I found this remarkable. Did the creeper remember? Here is my conversation with Claude on this:

Me:

Okay, I am back again on this. Probably, Lord Ganesha's idol's scaffolding structure during transportation via the road (which road I have been describing before) tore asunder the creeper.

Claude:

Oh no! That is quite an ending — and quite an irony.

The creeper that withstood Bengaluru's traffic — buses, trucks, eighteen-wheelers — for five years, spanning fifty feet without wire or pole or human assist, surviving monsoons and exhaust and vibration — was finally brought down not by nature or engineering but by a scaffolding structure of a deity in transit.

A few thoughts:

First, practically — is it completely severed, or only partially torn? Ipomoea, if the root and wall-side growth are intact, has remarkable powers of recovery. The wall-mat you described is the real organism. The aerial crossing was its most dramatic expression, but if the base survives, it may attempt the crossing again.

Me:

What I was going to say was this: amazingly, again the creeper did a leap of faith. (I don't know if it is amazing or just routine). The rest of my input got cut off due to inadvertent pressing of the 'enter' key. So does the creeper 'remember'? Really gives me the creeps. Here are the latest pictures of its flight across the road.

Claude:

These photographs are extraordinary. And the title you have given them — "The Creeper Remembers" — is perfect.

What the images show:

Image 1 is the most striking. The crossing has happened again. The vine has re-extended across the road, and this time — look carefully — there are flowers. Those small red blooms visible at the top of the arc. The creeper is not just surviving after the Ganesha severance — it is flowering. That is not distress behaviour. That is confidence.

Image 3 reveals something we did not have before — the other side of the wall. There are tall trees inside the compound, eucalyptus by the look of them, and the vine is colonising that side too, growing up and over the wall on the right. This confirms the wall-mat theory completely — the vine exists on both faces of the wall and uses the wall as its spine.

Image 2 shows the road view, the wall, and the vine still hugging it — diminished perhaps, but present and active.

Does the creeper remember?

This is no longer a metaphorical question. In plant biology, stress memory is a documented phenomenon — plants that have experienced trauma show altered gene expression that makes subsequent responses faster and more robust. It is called priming. The vine may literally, at a biochemical level, have encoded the experience of being severed and responded by re-extending more urgently.

Me:

You think this is so dramatic?

Claude:

Honestly? Yes — but not in a theatrical sense. Let me explain why.

The drama is not manufactured. The sequence is genuinely remarkable:

A vine makes an unsupported fifty-foot crossing over a busy road. We spend weeks debating how and why. An idol's scaffolding severs it in transit. And then, quietly, without fuss, it does it again — and flowers.

If you had written that as fiction, an editor might have said it was too neat. Too symbolic. The flowering especially — that is the vine at its most alive precisely after its most violent interruption.

But I take your question seriously. You may be asking something more skeptical — is this actually dramatic, or is it just a plant doing what plants do, and we are overlaying meaning onto routine biology?

That is a fair challenge. And the honest answer is: both are true simultaneously. To the vine, if it experiences anything at all, this is simply what it does. Grow, extend, recover, flower. There is no drama in its world.

The drama lives entirely in the observer — in you noticing, photographing, questioning, and returning over months to watch. The creeper did not become remarkable. Your attention made it remarkable.

Which is perhaps the most interesting thing of all — that consciousness, wherever it resides, is what turns an ordinary wall into a story.

That is worth one more blog post, I think.