The fern's secret

My last flat in Prague was an unlikely combo of tiny living quarters with a large garden terrace. (It may be my favourite place I have ever lived.) Lavender and ivy spilled over the concrete sides of the beds; dwarf firs, rhododendrons and hydrangeas filled in the ranks behind. Scattered around the terrace were containers holding more dwarf firs as well as a Virginia pine. All of these dwarf trees had been mulched, as it were, with white stones.

One day in the pot of one of the firs, I noticed a tiny leaf struggling to lift past the stone that lay on top of it. I couldn’t tell what kind of plant it was. Likely a weed (one of the celandines that kept trying to grow up furtively out of the cracks behind the containers)… but I wasn't sure. So I moved the stone aside. And then a few more. Day by day the little leaf straightened up and began to look fern-like. However, once it became more visible the slugs also noticed it, and soon it was being chewed. There were a few days when I wasn’t sure it would make it.

But then the slugs either got bored or the fern rallied to my daily encouragement, and her leaves grew longer and stronger.

Finally I transplanted her into a home of her own, where little spools of baby fern started appearing at the base, waiting to be unrolled into a frond…

The whole process of uncovering the fern reminded me of what Mevlana Rumi says about your task not being to seek love but to remove the barriers to it…

Reflecting on this story, I wondered if this fern came to me with a message, or what her special teaching might be. Certainly ferns are ancient plants, going back more than 300 million years. Then while reading "Nature Obscura: A City's Hidden World," I came across the following passage:

“Modern ferns have a secret and it is called neochrome. It sounds like a superhero power. And, in a way, it is. To understand neochrome, we have to understand light. Most plants respond to light on the blue end of the spectrum. Blue light triggers the plant’s photosynthetic reaction and helps regulate the opening and closing of the stomata, which control water and gas exchange in the leaves of most plants. The trees of the canopy hijack most of the blue light as it shines down on the forest, leaving little to penetrate through to the ferns far below in the shadows. But from the other end of the spectrum, an abundance of red light penetrates through to the forest floor. And here’s where the fern’s superhero power comes in. Neochrome is a light sensor that has not one but two proteins: a blue-sensing phototropin and a red-sensing phytochrome. These two proteins have fused together into a single molecule, allowing ferns to make use of light at both ends of the spectrum. This special ability allows them to thrive in the dark forest, but also take advantage when an opening is created in the canopy. This is something few other living organisms can do, and indeed, not even all ferns have this ability.”

“it appears that since the initial acquisition from the hornworts, ferns have been exchanging neochrome among themselves, sharing the ability with many different species of ferns, and with it conferring an advantage to growing in the dark.”