The house where I live is surrounded by vineyards. Not for wine making, but for the production of cognac. Each line of plants is known as a “wire” and each of the owners plant out, tend to, and harvest a certain number of wires.
There are no fences or hedges between each vineyard, but some of the wires run north to south, whilst others run east to west, or even on a diagonal. I don’t know how each person knows where their “patch” begins and ends but there are workers in the vineyards pretty much every day of the year, except Sundays.
Every single plant is tended individually, pruned back to two main branches, one running forward along the wire, and the other in the opposite direction.
I don’t know how many years of healthy productive life the plants have but there are three main phases of the vineyard, which you can see clearly, all at the same time in this photograph.
I just looked out of my window the other day towards sunset and spotted how I could capture all three phases in the one shot.
What you can see here are four distinct areas. The nearest and furthest away rare the currently active productive vines. These are the ones from which the grapes were harvested last year, and will be again, this coming year. In the middle there are two very different areas. The one nearer us shows an old, spent, field of vines in the process of being cut back and ripped up. Just beyond them in the grassy zone are rows and rows of new plants, each one protected by its own plastic tube.
It struck me, when I looked at this, that I could see the past and the future embedded in the present. I thought it was a vivid representation of the fact that time isn’t linear, it’s cyclical. There are cycles of seasons throughout a year, cycles of seeding, nurturing, growing, pruning, and removing the vines. And these cycles of the vines extend beyond single calendar years to encompass whole lifetimes of this remarkable plant.
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