In the natural world, spring is a great unfolding. Tender buds split their seams like over-laden luggage, laying out their trousseau of leaves and blossoms to freshen in the sun. Pupate insects unpack legs and lacey wings like alien landers dropped in from somewhere beyond our ken. And everywhere trap doors fly open from the vast underground empire of roots and rhizomes to launch green armies of chlorophyll across the dead landscape to join forces with their old ally, the sun.
Few living things unfold into existence with the elegance and grace of the fern. It may just be that practice makes perfect, since ferns have been unfurling themselves in spring for hundreds of millions of years. Along with their less stately clubmoss cousins, ferns were among the first vascular plants with the capacity to circulate water and nutrients throughout their systems, unlocking new possibilities for photosynthesis through both increased size and more elaborate architecture.
Consider the fern’s place in the line-up of evolution’s great parade. First came all the single-celled microscopic pioneers with alga, pondscums, seaweeds and kelps marching behind. From this fertile stew, molds, yeasts, and fungi flung or floated spores across the dividing strand of water and land, giving solid footing to subsequent spore spawners, including mosses and liverworts. With the its innovative vascular system, in time the fern literally rose above the rhizome rat race below to cast its spores a little farther afield.
Three men started their work week at our place Monday, arriving early to knock off a small job we had for them. Two diseased and blighted crabapple trees planted too close to the house 30 years ago by a previous owner were coming down. Each tree bore the Dayglo orange mark of the condemned, casually sprayed upon their trunks the week before by the arborist who came to give us a price.
Kate and I had decided that the failing trees had to go for the sake of the garden beds beneath them, for the sake of the utility wires threading through their branches, and for the sake of our backs which seem to be perpetually bent to the task of cleaning up the blighted leaves beneath them. The flocks of birds that shuttled to and from feeders from the protection of these two trees would soon find out that none of the morning’s activities would be for their sake – they would be simply forsaken.
We had convinced ourselves that getting rid of the trees was the best course, but we weren’t prepared for the swift and skillful violence that did them in. Within one hour, both trees were transformed from the elegant architecture of branch and budding leaf, designed over the years by light, wind, and rain, to two sap-seeping stumps and a pile of chips. Three men with saws and a wood shredder with a monstrous maw undid decades of cell by cell photosynthetic construction in plenty of time for the morning coffee break.
