Weed of the week
The parable of the petunia
It’s true. Observing something changes what is being observed. Sarah noticed a beautiful petunia had struggled into existence, springing from the crack between the footpath and her Woolloomooloo terrace house. It had bloomed into gorgeous purple velvet, an aristocrat of weeds among the usual thistles, dandelions and asthma weeds that enjoy their brief time in the sun before being zeroed by Council’s poison spray.
The petunia, in being photographed, attracted a more grisly fate. Two people of the (how to put it?) less aristocratic variety were sitting on a doorstep up the road. The bearded one casually wandered past as Sarah was clicking away and hung about further down the road, starting back as she finished shooting and went inside.
Later she went out and saw, with a stab of something like grief, that the petunia had been severed at ground level, gone. She pondered the insidious power of attachment and got a grip on herself – it was only a weed; the Council would have killed it anyway; it wasn’t hers in the first place; and perhaps the plant-napper had visions of taking it home, putting it into water to sweetly beautify his humble home.
Imagine Sarah’s surprise next morning when, after another noisy night of Kings Cross fallout, she emerged on a breakfast mission only to see, a little way up the street, the wilted petunia flower lying soggy in a pool of puke like a dead rock star. Why? she asked herself, discarding her fantasy of the flower’s fate and reflecting on the power of illusion.
That night the cleansing rain came, washing away the puke and leaving the flower a small purple paean to the transience of life.
But as Timothy Leary, the original flower child, said as an old man: “If you want to immortalise, digitise.” So here is the immortal petunia, in print and on the web, achieving global reach in its ignominious death.
The naked city has a million stories. This is one of them.
by Michael Gormly
