The plant is unassuming, three blunt leaves here and there along the length of a vine, plain and not particularly friendly to the eye. It’s a liana technically, a vine that grows out the ground and found in the rainforests of Chile and Argentina and not much elsewhere. Taken alone, it’s a piece of green among the green and anyone might be forgiven for tearing it from the ground to fling to the side, clearing a path for walking. A botanist, drawing from the accumulated knowledge tucked into their brain, would be quick to disabuse that first impression. No, this is a one-of-a-kind skillful dissembler, this vine, Boquila trifoliolata. Locate it in the company of other species and this will gradually become evident, it will grow in the direction of other plants and tangle and mesh with their leaves and stems, then over time magically morph its own leaves to roughly match the shape and size and color of those around it.
It’s as if B. trifoliolata could view through its leaves the sights around it, could study the leaves of its many hosts closely, sketching from a life model, sculpting with its own approximate replicants of leaves around it. There’s a theory, in fact, that asserts the plant does employ a primitive form of vision, using the lens-like cells of its leaves, “ocelli”, to do so. Reference is made to a certain biologist and amateur photographer who sometime in the earlier decades of last century stunned attendants at one of his lectures by displaying many hazy black-and-white landscape photographs taken using such plant cells as lenses. Such sights amazed a few dozen people in a room before being forgotten, only to be recalled later in a study published in the journal Plant Signaling & Behavior a century later. This theory has attracted many informed doubters and doesn’t seem likely to be proven true anytime soon. Disproving it, though, wouldn’t seem to diminish the strangeness of the plant when it finds a host and seeks to disguise itself through mimicry. How else to explain it?
Underground, roots talk: another theory. They communicate, exchange nutrients. Through a process called “horizontal gene transfer”, HGT, they can even transfer their own DNA to other plants through microbial networks. This may explain where the vine gains information about the size, color, shape of leaves of those many plants it chooses to climb upon. But with what capacity can it analyze foreign DNA and then direct its own molecular expressions to mutate the characteristics of leaves and tendrils? And when removed from the company of a host plant, how can it manage to revert back to its native form? The HGT theory only highlights further gradations of inexplicability, the many mundane unknowables of B. trifoliolata.
Across unfathomable time-scales it developed this ability to disguise itself, to outwit predators, blending with the company of less appetizing species. Far along in its survival, it came to the notice of someone with the patience to notice and the learning to understand how unusual this was. For good reason it had taken this long because people were perhaps among its many predators, but unaware of this. Once discovered, it would be put through many tests, observed, analyzed. What sorts of leaf-shapes could it replicate with ease? Which were more difficult to mimic? It turns out B. trifoliolata, despite many efforts to do so, had trouble copying jagged serrated edges. But still, it would do its best to approximate, settling on a passable impression of its host.
Deceit is for survival: the entire history of the vine fulfills the aphorism. It applies equally to other species, flora and fauna, insects and lizards, predators and prey alike. Strategies of face and behavior, people in the singular blending with people plural. Seeking safety or advantage, being like. Spare of influence, the plant is plain, remember, three unremarkable leaves here, three unremarkable leaves there, practically begging to be eaten. Not from cowardice but from cleverness it sheds its form, assumes another. Since it can’t run, it hides. People do one better, hiding while running, even while standing in place, resembling a loved one or a stranger. A rare few are luckier, and can live simpler lives: present themselves openly. These the others cling to and imitate, hoping to be spared or elevated. Exchanging DNA with stronger types at the root-level, they gain a future and retain a self, at the expense of a self. The unremarkable soul writing this very sentence is no different: he slips into the host style of many more durable forebears, to feed and dream and breathe and clothe himself. Leaves bitter to taste. Leaves inhospitable to chewing.
