Lighthearted, joyous, and usually found growing every which way in small patches, what’s not to love about ferns? They certainly have a special place in my heart. I remember once – a brilliant midsummer day on a small island off the coast of Maine – standing in the midst of a huge field of them, all rugged and leathery from the wind and salt air, but a beautiful hue of green nonetheless. Somewhere in my slide collection, there’s a 360 panorama of that scene waiting to be released into the world.
I had a girlfriend once who went on to a lifetime with flowers and plants, and seems to have developed a keen awareness of their secret lives along the way. She and I never had a conversation about ferns, or even flowers; we were young and barely formed, and a romance that bloomed so sweetly in the dead of winter, was gone by the time the fiddleheads appeared in the spring. And so it goes; decades later, I wonder what she knows about ferns.