Foliage, Colour

Broad, glossy leaves of a tropical fig spread low across a pale yellow wall. Their surfaces are deeply veined and catch the light like lacquer. At the centre a new leaf stands upright, still tightly rolled in its sheath, and near the base two round, rough-skinned fruits sit half hidden among the stems.

It is the green that arrives first — a green so deep it is almost black where the leaves overlap. Then you notice that nothing here is finished. The old leaves are wide open and a little worn at the edges. The new one has not yet unrolled. The fruit is still small and hard. Every stage of the plant's life is in the frame at once, and none of them is waiting for the others.

We tend to count our years one at a time, as though each were a room we leave behind. Perhaps they are more like these leaves: the old ones still spreading, the new one still closed, all of them growing from the same stem.

Perhaps every age we have been is still growing somewhere in us.