In all these years on the road, I haven’t seen anything the exudes malicious intent quite like ‘come heather,’ which, before you get any ideas, is a shrub. Heather is the pinkish-purple bush you sometimes see in upscale parks, its tips little flowering fingers, tickling the underside of butterflies and swarming with ravenous bees. In my experience, the presence of bees lend mundane heather a sickly sort of motion already. Wriggling. Undulating like a deep sea atrocity on a windless day.
‘Come heather’ moves of its own accord, its spindly towers sensing the displacement of air around them, bending on hidden joints. It’s the perfect replication of the come-hither motion and, though I know it’s a quirk of evolution, something to keep predatory birds away or attract necessary pollinators, the whole thing makes me queasy. The motion is too intimate. Too familiar. It activates subconscious protocols, making me question whether I know this plant from somewhere, as though I may have gotten drunk at a party, once, and told it some dark secret of mine.
I feel all this discomfort before I ever step foot in the maze.
‘One would think that ‘The Come Heather Maze’ would be exponentially more uncomfortable than the plant in its natural environment, but curation has the opposite effect, demoting it to a novelty rather than a truly uncanny quirk of nature. Perhaps it’s the desperate lengths the creators attempted to capitalize on the movement, choosing topiary structures they felt would benefit from the plant’s trick. None of them quite work as intended and because heather doesn’t tend to grow tall or sturdy, so much of the garden’s infrastructure shows that ‘The Come Heather Maze’ feels more like the foundation of a ruined house, derelict and a little sad.’
Hector loves the ‘come heather,’ or, he seems to love the idea of the stuff. Heather is high on the toxicity scale for pets so I keep him on a short leash as we trudge through the maze, dodging long tendrils and cringing when I come to ‘sensory arches,’ where the plant is allowed to grow freely and tickle passersby.
We leave a little early, in part, yes, because I don’t like mazes and I don’t like the ‘come heather,’ but mostly because Hector escalates to frantic state I’ve never seen, squeaking and hopping in circles and nibbling on his leash. It’s everything I can do to hold him back from gorging himself on the poison flower.
He calms, a little, once we’ve made it back to the parking lot, but his beady eyes stare through the slats of the kennel, watching the walls of ‘The Come Heather Maze’ shift behind us. Maybe the motion is meant for creatures like him. Maybe ‘come heather’ is a monster for small animals: a rodent siren. It must look like a paradise, then, and I wonder what he must think of me, parading him through and pulling him away.
-traveler
