Transcript
Speaker: I'm Katherine Pultz and this is Plant Kingdom. Plant Kingdom is a conversation series about the sublime in nature and environment, featuring scientists, artists, researchers, and writers.
Speaker: Today's conversation is with cultural studies scholar Dr. Solvay Nitske. Based in Vienna, Solvay is the author of The Elegance of Ferns, Portrait of a Botanical Marvel, released this year by Greystone Books.
Speaker: In our conversation, we talk about the enchantment of ferns, from the Victorian fern craze, Pteridomania, to the significance of ferns in culture and the ways we have tried to understand them.
Speaker: We honor this ancient life and consider what we can learn from looking at the forest floor. Here's our conversation.
Speaker: Well, thank you for speaking with me today. can you just start by introducing yourself and tell us a bit about where you're based and your your current research? Yes, I'm happy to. So my name is Solveig Nitzke. I am, as of now, basically, um a newly appointed ah professor of comparative literature and at the University of Vienna.
Speaker: Not yet there, but almost. So I have been working on... cultural studies issues, mostly during the last, I want to say 15 years. um I've started working on disaster and catastrophe research, so all kinds of science fictions and fictions of science.
Speaker: And that has led me through climate to trees and then to ferns and also i am very interested interested in science communication so that is one of my research topics but also something I try to engage in and this is where the ferns come in because that is my first proper non solely academic book in Yeah, beautiful. And I'm i'm looking forward to talking to you about your gorgeous book, The Elegance of Ferns, Portrait of a Botanical Marvel. was translated into English this year and published by Greystone Books. Can you can you tell us a bit about this book? It came out in German in 2025 and I wrote it in German. I'm i'm happy that Helge Dascher translated it into English. It was such a beautiful process. But the book has been year long a years long decade, almost long dream of mine. um It's part of a series in Germany called Naturkunden, which is not exactly nature writing, but trying to find a way to do something that is similar to nature writing, but also true to nature. let's say, more Germanophone traditions of combining more creative writing, more personal writing with a scientific outlook. And scientific here, this word kunde translates roughly to what in English would be an algy. So it's like this way of really diving into a topic and you don't necessarily have to be a scientist proper with all the degrees or so, but it's more an intense way of encountering a topic from so-called nature and write about it. And this Naturkunden series connects to, you know, writings of Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe, not at all intimidating to be in that kind of row.
Speaker: or a series. So it's ah a narrative account of Ferns that includes myself, which was a kind of daunting task for someone who has learned to write academically.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you for that. And I really love that about the the book too, that you combine research-based perspectives, examples from literature and in history, but also that personal aspect. And I think that's something that's, I know you're not writing from a scientist's perspective, but in science writing it, it's so, it doesn't exist, right? Like, e it's it's really hard to insert your own experience and Joy, maybe into a text about taxa or environment or something. yeah because there are so many people writing about plants that ah notice exactly that. And especially in a German context, you're expected to take your personal feelings out of it. which is difficult because it's such a big part of encountering your subject and with plants it's even more difficult I think because all of the things that we talk about why it is so difficult to to write about plants to talk about plants to get people's attention towards plants is that we tend to talk about them as if they're just silent beings pressed into ah florilegia and it's that they're growing beings it's so exciting yeah I think with Yeah, it's very vulnerable to put yourself into it into it, but you have to open yourself up to relate to the ferns. And was it is it right that your interest in ferns grew out of or was ignited by ah your discovery of the Victorian fern craze? Pteridomania? Is that...
Speaker: Is that right? how it How did ferns come into your life in this way? Yeah, i mean, ferns came into my life, as with all plants, I discovered that they have been in my life all the time. I just never properly noticed them, but they came into my life because they're so old. And I'm really interested academically in deep time narratives and it's so interesting to see that there is a plant that basically is a marker for this is older than the dinosaurs and this is the kind of narrative I was interested in and then I found a cool poem about it But you're right.
Speaker: Pterodomania. i don't want to say I i became interested in pterodomania. I basically became infected. i caught fern fever when I when i found, when i when I discovered or when I encountered other infected people, which is, and I say infected because the language of fern fever, Sarah Whittingham has written this great book with this title, is the language that was used in the Victorian area when fern, Suddenly, everyone, it seemed, and by everyone, of course, everyone with disposable time and income, went crazy about ferns. It was the fashionable thing. And the Victorian age wasn't poor of crazes. They were crazy about everything, which is, I think, with all the problematic aspects of Victorianism, but...
Speaker: um or Victorians, this is one of the things that I love. I can absolutely relate to people collecting weird stuff. And collecting weird stuff is basically what happened with ferns. And the the interesting thing is that ferns seem to undermine and resist some of the efforts that people undertook of ferns. finding them of collecting them it was just this combination of finding the right books meeting the right people and being sucked really into this is what it felt like being sucked into an age where ferns seem to be everywhere in the british empire and then it seemed to have like these borders because i tried to figure out
Speaker: If people in in Germany and Austria, where I usually do my research, have ever been even closely as crazed about ferns than the Victorians have, and the answer is a very simple no.
Speaker: Everybody always liked ferns and they were interesting. And especially if you're into taxonomy, they're an unrivaled challenge in in trying to identify or re-report. figure out how they work but it was really this story of empire that made ferns into protagonists it was a very bourgeois yeah enterprise this this fern collection but yes it kind of infected me and it helped that that happened during the pandemic and i was glad to be infected with something that wouldn't kill me anytime soon if i might put it like this so i had kind of time
Speaker: And I was happy to research something that wouldn't scare me in the same way. And it gave me an excuse to dive into all the things I love, you know, deep time and realist novels and Victorian literature and cute Southern English countryside descriptions and all kinds of popularized science and debates and actual fights about who gets to identify ferns, who gets to talk about ferns. And then the more slippery stories that I really liked. And I found a couple of things that were just kind of juicy to find. And yeah, that kept me in the fern loop.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess there's like through looking at the fern craze, you can explore so many aspects of Victorian culture. And in terms of the kind of material culture of Pterodomania, it wasn't just, yeah, I thought it was more like just aesthetic, but that's really interesting. It relates to the expansion of empire and colonialism and it was everything it was aesthetic and economic and it was a story of morals and ideas of of gendered occupation and of um as you said imperialism and of the very practical questions of how do you transport a fern from the colonies to to england how do you propagate ferns So it's like from the very, very horticulturally practical to like very lofty ideas of what is a woman and how should she spend her time? Everything's in there. And that's the kind of topic that usually draws me into rabbit holes for a couple of years or more.
Speaker: Yeah. So people were like their fern, fern decor on biscuits, on wallpaper, on everything. People are growing ferns in their homes. They're creating gardens. They're growing ferns in Wardian cases. Like the earliest greenhouses are taking form. It's in literature. It's in every, manifests in many different ways, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly. And it becomes a kind of language that is something that also intrigued me, where people in the know were able to basically use ferns in the way that the so-called language of flowers was also used. um But it was more subtle. Again, no flowers. um So people who knew ferns were able to communicate ferns. secretly almost through them and it still works. Yeah. And language of flowers. Can you just explain what that is?
Speaker: Yeah, it's mostly my my colleague, Isabel Kranz wrote beautifully about this. The language of flowers is mostly and a concept. um It's not especially clear if anyone ever really used it. So it's basically a vocabulary where a specific flower stands for a specific word. So you would be able to use um flowers as a kind of code to communicate, for example, to your lover, when to meet, where to meet and what to do when you meet. um And you could do that by, for example, painting little bouquets on postcards. or writing little poems or writing little letters. um And you would have to have this kind of mediation because to use the full extent of the language of flowers, um you would have to have like tons of green or
Speaker: vast areas of greenhouses because most of those flowers don't grow at the same time. So in order to have like tulips with asters and things together, you would have to use language. So it's it's very interesting from a literary studies and linguistic point of view.
Speaker: Because the symbolism really quickly turns into this kind of pragmatic use. But it's mostly a language um that combines this aesthetic purpose with the communicative one. And it is it is kind of a hobby thing to do. You know you need to have time and disposable income to be able to spend your time learning all kinds of flowers by heart. And it's different with ferns because they're not as easy to distinguish.
Speaker: So you need to be aware that ferns means thousands of species and not just the green things with the fronts in the forest. Yeah, it's interesting. It's very um very romantic, isn't it? have a little dictionary of the language of flowers. And is is that kind of where like The white rose means this and the yellow rose means... You don't want to give someone the wrong color. You're trying to court them. Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly. Look, we're talking about flowers again. meant to be talking about ferns. The flowers just creep in. i wanted to to ask the the elegance of ferns also features...
Speaker: a lot of artworks. You mentioned some of these already. I did want to ask you about the work of Anna Atkins, who is a botanist and photographer born in 1799. Can you tell us a bit about the significance of of her work and what it was like being a woman engaged in botany in this time.
Speaker: i wouldn't dare to to begin to um say this what the significance of Anna Atkins is because she's i mean she's one of the most fascinating um artists, scientists, and I try to point out the the slash between artists and scientists. I think it's it's very interesting about her that she is one of the people in the 19th century, you mentioned she was born in 1799, and she died she lived almost through the whole century. And she was one of the people who are a product of of a time where the disciplines weren't as distinguished yet as they are now. So you could be a botanist and an ontologist and all kinds of things at the same time. And you could also be basically ah an engineer or an inventor,
Speaker: And a scientist at the same time, it wasn't as different. But the thing is, you said, living as a woman in Victorian times came with certain restrictions. Anna Atkins or Anna Children is her maid maiden name. I hate that word, but that's what it's called.
Speaker: she she was born into very privileged circumstances otherwise she couldn't have done any of the things she did which is and when i say things she did she's famous you probably even if you don't know her by name know the blueprints she did um she's most recognized for the british algae um collection she did where she collected algae and then Through this new process of cyanotype or blueprint, she laid them out on paper that was treated with a chemical solution.
Speaker: And I couldn't recreate it, but it's possible. You can find recipes on the internet today. And the paper is treated with a chemical solution. You put the plant on it and then all the areas that are hit by sunlight turn blue when you wash the paper out in water. And ah wherever you put the plant remains white. So you have these beautiful and eerie, somewhat somewhat ghostly images of white plants on blue paper. And she did that because she had the opportunity and she had a very loving father. And I think it's worth mentioning that Pooh
Speaker: gave her access and saw to it that she had access to all kinds of education that was available at the time, which means she didn't get to go to a formal school, but she had access to all the books. All her father's friends would tell her about things and she must have been a very attentive and curious person and quick to grasp things. And so when i think it was John Herschel who developed the cyanotape process, told her father about it, he thought of his daughter who was engaged since she was a a young woman or even a girl in botanical drawings. And she was very, very good at doing this and provided images to, i think, the london London Botanical Society and, um, At some point, I think when she was around 40, she even became a member, which was a big thing. I think she didn't get to be part of the meetings. So it was both, she was both able to pursue her interests and her interest was in producing music.
Speaker: very precise images of plants that made it possible to really precisely identify specific plants, which is, it sounds easy, it's not. it's It's the most difficult thing. And one reason why botany students are still taught to draw is that it kind of schools your vision And the drawings are easier to recognize.
Speaker: But she also, I mean, she was married, she never had kids, which gave her some freedom. She also profited from colonialism pretty directly. I think her husband was involved in and plantation management or something like that. So she's um she's combining all the things that make victorian people interesting and problematic but she has had a surge of interest since there have been i think in 2017 there was like a huge exhibit exhibit in the reichs museum in amsterdam and stuff like that people try to collect these things and really recognize the pioneer work that she has done yeah thank you yeah they're they're beautiful and i think that
Speaker: They have different information in them, right? Than ah a drawing. the like the such The contrast look makes you, draws your eyes to the form so much. And these are two scales. so you get the actual size of the plants. You get all the details of the the teeth on every single pinnae every leaf on whatever plant she's using with the seaweeds it's so beautiful to capture like the translucency of the seaweeds too yeah it's a really interesting medium that just gives you so much more information or draws your eyes to different things than a drawing would or actually looking at the actual plant itself might like it really they're really beautiful
Speaker: it's Yeah, it's really interesting there the time when before science and art were really separated from each other and when observing and documenting was really integral or ah ah the main ah work of science at the time.
Speaker: So you, I guess, in in The Elegance of Ferns, you've written about various societies and cultures and how they relate to ferns. But I guess, can you talk a bit about your own relationship to ferns? And has this changed over time or or in the process of of writing this book?
Speaker: Yeah, that it definitely has changed. My relationship to ferns grew greatly. both closer and more distant, I guess. So I start more distant. The more I learned about ferns, both of their natural history and how difficult it is to identify them, um the more I took a step back from thinking I could ever know them, because I have like a super bad memory for for names. i'm I'm a bad taxonomist, but Also because they are an actual marvel and you don't step too close to a marvel, I guess. But it also grew closer. i mean, in a very practical sense, I ate ferns for the first time. And for people from Canada or Korea, that this won't be anything super exciting. I mean, and i'm I'm usually not a forager, it made my family a little bit nervous that I tried that. But I also turned into someone, and I really mean that as a personal change.
Speaker: There's too much talk about growth on the internet, so I won't say that, but it's a personal change of how much closer i look in all the curvacies of walls and like if you have a drywall or something. And I will be the one who looks in every spring and every every well and see there are tiny ferns coming out of the walls and I learned to appreciate the different structures, the different textures of the f fronts and the different places where they grow. And even though it still hasn't turned me into someone who can properly remember all the the terms and and names of all the things that I should know, I think it made me, and you can tell by me being being slower and speaking now that it's still strange to me, but it made me a more poetic person, if that makes sense, because I need...
Speaker: all the metaphors, all the kinds of anthropomorphizations, all the kinds of wordplay to describe this weird relationship when you find a plant that wants nothing off you that will maybe not profit particularly and that won't make you profit of it. and I mean, it makes sense to, you know, learn your berries or even your mushrooms and fungi to be able to know what to eat. And although there are fern species you can't you can't eat, you will never really profit from having a fern field or something except for
Speaker: Aesthetic pleasure and the knowledge that you figured out how to negotiate coexistence with a very particular being because ferns are so particular and it's it's almost like living with a cat and and you you will never really...
Speaker: the the cat will never allow you to i don't know entertain the illusion that you own it and this is a central experience that i made with ferns and i found that others made with ferns that ferns reject human attention and that is so intriguing and of course as a scholar i'm someone who will not be rejected and kind of looks for ferns and finds ways of of um connecting with them and that really changed me and it changed me because i've always been an enthusiastic writer but now i defend the enthusiasm and the passion of writing about plants in a way that is different to before because it's not just my personal pleasure i think it doesn't make sense like in a very literal way, it does not make sense. There is no sense in it if you don't put yourself in it as well and figure out how this closeness and distance is necessary in relationships with plants. Because if you don't have that, if you don't accept ferns in particular, but also trees and even flowers, although I have come to think of them as kind of flashy and, you know,
Speaker: But if if you don't do that, if you don't accept plants as something that rejects your total understanding or our human sense of control over others, then you will destroy them also in a very literal sense. And that is something that, yeah, now accompanies me whenever I go outside.
Speaker: Yeah, beautiful. I think I... I agree in terms of the, you know, the work it is learning the language, the taxonomy, like your relationship with plants, like it's just,
Speaker: for for plant people. It's just their life's work, right? Like it's a, it's a task that will take you through all of the the decades and and learning and and seeing and appreciating and and wondering. And the, I love that. Yeah. You have to get to know them on their own term, of their own terms, like a cat. Yeah. and our In our last conversation, we we had a chat about ferns not being, you know, they're not working plants. They don't have a ah real utility or industrialization. Like,
Speaker: apples or or lettuce or or something that that comes to define how you relate to those plants or the easiest shortcut to what they mean is how we use them in ferns.
Speaker: It's quite different, different challenge or way of relating to plants that we're not consuming or gardening for a purpose. it's quite It's quite interesting. And most plants are like that, but we don't often dedicate books to them.
Speaker: or Or popular culture. We don't have language for them maybe yet Yeah, it's it's happening more and more. I'm happy to say that people are dedicating books to that. And it's interesting how different that is in different um surroundings and environments. um I mean, human environments and in that case. um How being interested in plants is framed and whether it it makes sense to people or whether it makes you weird.
Speaker: But I also think that that is a very valuable um experience that once you get into plans, also again, quite literally, you kind of need to negotiate that you step away from people little bit and that you step outside of these consumer logics. But so there is this this opportunity yeah too get away from yourself a little bit with her the ferns. discover things about you. I never really knew that I was talking to plants until ferns came along and I met my my favorite in a um a forested area in in the south of England. and stumbled across a heart's tongue fern and first thing I said was Adabistia so there you are um and it stopped me in my tracks because I was like okay I've turned into crazy fern lady I'm now talking to plants congratulations Solveig but I've come to embrace it and now I talk to more plants than before
Speaker: ah Hey, i always acknowledge plants. Like, you look nice today. Like, oh, you've earned flower. And with like, yeah, listen, I think i think plant people are good people. i think I used to feel weird until the bubble of plant people, until you just live in the bubble and you're like, it's it's wonderful.
Speaker: It is true. And it's it's fun to talk to others who share this passion. And it's like... every kind of niche club. ah Although it's funny that it's niche when you think of the biomass of plants, you go like, what why why are we weird?
Speaker: Why aren't the people who don't think about plants all day? Yeah, exactly. exactly It's their world. We're just living in it, but they're just waiting us out. when We think it's about us. Yes, swear of course, of course, of course.
Speaker: Heartstongue fern, great, great choice for for top fern. There is another one I wanted to talk to you about that you write about in one of your fern profiles, and it's bracken fern, which is a nice fern for me. but like it's It's really interesting how cosmopolitan some of these European ferns Bracken fern, like male fern, also is in North America and Canada, so I've encountered it many times. It inspired me to pick up my old Peterson's Field Guide to Ferns, which doesn't serve me too well in Australia, but I keep for the the sentimental ah value of it. But Bracken in that book is just, it that it's described as it's perhaps the world's most cosmopolitan fern common throughout the globe. It's large starchy rhizomes creep over large areas.
Speaker: Its profuse fronds can suppress the growth of other plants. It's generally considered the preeminent weed of the fern family. And to that, I would add, I love how you reminded us, you wrote the name Terridium. Its Latin name is Terridium aquilinum. The name Terridium comes from the Greek teron for feather, refers to the appearance of the Brackens fronds, which is it gives it some nice respect. And i guess, could you could you tell us a bit why you chose Bracken as one of your your profiled plants and it's mentioned a few times in the book also interesting historical uses of it can you tell us a bit about bracken fern
Speaker: Yeah, again, everything I know about Brackenfurn comes from Sarah Whittingham, who is, I think, still working on a book about Bracken. I'm waiting for that eagerly. But so the reason why I included it, the book has, I think it's eight portraits at the end of of specific species with their own illustrations. And Bracken I included because it's not only the most cosmopolitan, that sounds a very lofty, but it's the one you're most likely to encounter.
Speaker: Bracken is one of the ferns that for me were just what a fern is. So bracken and wood ferns were like my typical fern images. And one of the reasons is that if you cut down a part of the forest, bracken is most likely to cover the ground. So it is a difficult plant to have in a garden where you want to decide what grows. As you quoted, preeminent weed means it's very good at growing without being asked. Successful. my yeah Exactly. That is my ah Richard Mabby borrowed definition of what a weed is. But it also is one of the ferns that allows you to learn or allow me to learn how a fern is structured. with the different you know the different fronds that divided differently and you can see it and there is in my opinion nothing more beautiful than coming into a forest where brecon is just springing up and it's still and it's furled i think it's tripe in it so you have the the stem and then stems come from it and then the fronds come from that stem so you have three different parts that are furled up in this fractal way and it's
Speaker: incredibly beautiful. I can stand an hour in front of the Bracket Fern. And yes, it has had historical uses because it's so plentiful. It has been used mostly like you would use reeds or straw.
Speaker: So you can stuff mattresses with it. You can put it in your and your roof. you can You can put it um under cows in the winter and under yourself in the winter and you can put in your roof. All those uses are not not required anymore in in a globalized world. So we forgot most of them and it has become just a nuisance. And I am particularly fond of weeds. I know it's difficult and problematic and stuff, but I'm i'm kind of ah on the side of weeds because I have a soft spot for things that grow without being asked. And i think bracken is underappreciated for the things it does
Speaker: to mend what we do to forests, for example. Because when bracken fern grows over cut down areas in ah in a forest, it shades the soil so other plants can grow.
Speaker: It keeps the moisture in the in the soil and it provides nutrients where the trees have been taken away. So we owe lots of our forests, at least in Europe, to bracken fern um and I think that's a good reason to be thankful to ferns, even if they're not working plants per se. They're creating oxygen. They're doing lots. That too. Oh yeah. Just... i always forget that I need to breathe.
Speaker: Just that. All that other stuff. And you write ah you write a lot about the fascination and lore around fern reproduction, which took scientists quite a quite a long time to to crack just to to read a section from your book you wrote ferns mosses and other spore-bearing plants posed a problem for Linnaeus because no one understood how they reproduced hence the the one hard name from botany cryptogamia which literally means hidden crypto and marriages gamen which gametophyte gametes come from comes from as well For pragmatic reasons, Linnaeus placed all plants whose flowers or pollen he could not find into this category of invisible reproduction.
Speaker: Meanwhile, in folklore about invisible fern blossoms, magical flowers believed to appear only under special circumstances, inadvertently reinforced by Linnaeus's classification. can you Can you elaborate a bit on on the the lore and mystery of the cryptogam and what it what it inspired?
Speaker: Yeah, I can. And I love to, because I think this really shows how it is very reasonable of me and others who have written about ferns to consider ferns to be kind of tricksters. Because, I mean, the great Carl Linnaeus sat there and looked at it and was like, yeah, great. I just made up this great system of taxonomizing plants, according to the statement in their flowers. Now these don't have flowers.
Speaker: where to put them and i and i don't mean i ah yeah exactly i love that category yeah it's a story about the pragmatism of science because a scientist doesn't have a problem when they don't know something yeah because i mean it's always not known yet we don't know yet which is the best thing to do you put it into others and it's like secret marriage whatever others can find out about this yeah secret marriage plan but i mean yeah i'm not the only person in history of course who reads that and reads it wrong on purpose because i know that carl linnaeus didn't want me and other poetically inclined people to misunderstand that as like an invitation to make up myths and folklore or to connect it to it but he can't keep us. lot of people felt reminded or it it connects very well to fern lore that goes back far beyond Carver the News. I wrote about all kinds of of fern myth and fern
Speaker: mythology really that has been enacted all over the world and I specifically looked at New Zealand and New Zealanders Maori um are not as concerned with all the secrecy about it but Europeans always were and this idea that there is a plant that reproduces but you can't tell how, made it special. So there are stories, Hildegard von Bingen, for example, recommended that you plant ferns close to your house because it keeps you from or it keeps the house from being struck by lightning or it can't protect newborns or you can use it for all kinds of medicinal purposes, but those are, in my opinion, almost boring. Who cares about livers anyway?
Speaker: There are still folkloric practices and that always kind of degrades it it because it sounds like this old timey stuff, but it really is something that builds community when you go out in midsummer, for example. To find fern seeds. Yeah, yeah, to find fern seeds. And that again connects it to the Victorians. Because my favorite story about teridomania is that it was considered a good pastime for proper middle class or bourgeois girls. Because since the plant ah the ferns don't have flowers who hang out their sexual organs for you to they were considered kind of prudent plants because they wouldn't get any ideas into girls' heads. So it would be okay to go with your boyfriend into the forest to look for ferns. I read that and go like, really?
Speaker: you think You think they're not getting it by themselves? Okay, well, fine. And looking for fern seeds can have, or for fern flowers, depending on where you are, has a similar purpose. It's this exception once a year where you can be with someone you like or you who are you are attracted to.
Speaker: to look for something that has a magical purpose. So the fern seed, for example, which of course in in scientific wording would never have existed because ferns reproduce via spores, not seeds. But the idea was that the fern seed is so powerful that it only appears once a year during midsummer. So you need to find it and you need to protect it from others who want it. So demons and witches and devils and all kinds of things. And if you get it, it either leads you to a treasure, which can be a romantic partner. It can be money or gold, but it also can strengthen your relationship with a non-human world. So for example, if you found the fern seed,
Speaker: during midsummer and you keep it in your pocket during new year you can hear the farm animals talk and you can talk back to them isn't that cool you can also take the fern seed a fern seed and exchange it for your soul because it's so valuable to the devil. So you give it to the devil and the devil gives you your soul. Isn't that cool? All kinds of stories like that. And it still is this emblem of romantic love and this idea of going into the forest. And of course, people always knew that when young people went together into the forest, they might get into the dark, wet parts of the forest. They might get ideas and sometimes come back with another treasure. so
Speaker: I think it's the Lithuanian word for pregnancy is still fern flower or something like that. Yeah. And so there is this this history of a relationship with something that, and I want to stress that it's it's not fair to just, you know, put that into folklore as something that we have been past. we We're past that. We're smarter than that because we're not. We have, um and with we, I mean, i as a city person who has never heard before of that before and never been part of such traditions, I think
Speaker: It's a loss and it's a shame that we don't have these always already playful relationships. Because, I mean, probably no one ever found the fern seed. And still people gather Midsommar to celebrate these traditions and reminded that ferns grow it in the forest and there are things that we don't know and that there are things that...
Speaker: promise things that we call magical. They're part of the culture that brings us together, not with not only with other humans, but also includes plants and animals in this.
Speaker: Yeah, it's tradition and a different different cultural knowledge and cultural practice that we're kind of more divorced from but should we should we talk about how ferns actually reproduce oh yes len because it's even weirder than yes it is and i love to talk how ferns actually i love to talk about how ferns actually reproduce because of course i learned about this in my biology class and i learned about the two stages with the gametophyte. So a fern doesn't reproduce via seeds, so it produces spores. um They're older than seeds. This is why they don't have seeds. yeah
Speaker: Exactly. They're older than seeds. they yeah They just don't need that new stuff, yeah modern inventions. So what they need is water. And that makes it so interesting because not going into the whole structure of ferns, but so...
Speaker: What happens is that the sporophyte, so the plant that you would usually encounter that is big enough for you to see without kneeling down, produces these little knobs under the front.
Speaker: And I always mix them up because I think bigger things should have longer words, but it's not the case. So it's ah the sori are like little capsules that contain the spores in sporangia, so little clusters of spores. And this is where the first cool thing happens. and it has just been found out a couple of years ago. There's a little catapult in the little fern spore capsules that throws out the spores into the air because the spores are so light that they would cling to the plants if they wouldn't throw them out. So there is, it's something about the cell wall being dry and then releasing the the spores into the air where they kind of float around and hit the ground at some point. And if the ground is nice then nice and moist and slimy and a watery film mixed with soil is the perfect example of slime. So the spore needs to land in slime and then the little gametophyte grows from it. And it has this heart-shaped little leaf that produces the...
Speaker: is it gametes gametes yeah be a yeah the sperm and the egg yeah gametes um this yeah i see i try to avoid saying sperm and egg because that's where everybody goes in and it's like us i blew it this is the male cell this is the female cell and i am convinced that friends couldn't care less about binary binary gender. Yeah, the female's the big one. So yeah. So you have a bigger one and a smaller one. One can move, one doesn't. But how does it work? So the spores are there and then the gametophyte grows a little tiny heart-shaped plant and it produces cells with one set of
Speaker: DNA and you need two sets of DNA to grow the sporophyte. So that, that I knew, but it's like, how do they get there? So the slimy film between the gametophyte allows the sperm cells. So the the tiny, tiny gametes with the wiggly tail that can move and they need to travel through the slime to the, let's call it egg cell, um,
Speaker: to reproduce, which is such a good story because you need the forest to be wet and somewhat warm and slimy and then have the sex scene under the fronds that you really don't know about and that you only know about because scientists in the 19th and early 20th century didn't have like a word count so they could just write down everything they knew. and I found in some are old articles where they tried out what kind of, it's not,
Speaker: It's not really a scent that we could smell with our noses, but it's a kind of chemical signal where one cell seduces the other to come over and form a new sporophyte. So I really like that. And this is like this whole thing where, again, I'm i'm reading too much into it, but also... trying to have them tell me them give me the whole story and not just make it such a sterile thing because it's everything but it's it really it really needs feels so animal in a way right even though they are not but like the movement the chemicals like it's it's relatable
Speaker: ah under the fronts of ferns happened sticky sexy things And science only came to find out how those sticky, sexy things happened decades later, which I really love because people had this feeling about this because this kind of environment may be...
Speaker: is recognizable to us. um But at the same time, it makes the plants less passive. So a fern doesn't need a bee to come to it and to fertilize it.
Speaker: It just does it by itself. And it is so exuberant in it. If you consider how many spores, I mean, trees are exuberant with seeds too. i don't I don't want to diminish that. But But spores spores can travel like around the world on wind. Yes, they do so And again, a difficult concept, but they colonize islands where nothing grows anymore because a volcano just erupted and killed everything. And then you have like two fern spores, and that's enough to populate an entire island. with There's moss into Antarctica that's come from... south America from spores on Antarctic trade winds like the spore is very good at doing what it does.
Speaker: Yeah, i mean, talking about cosmopolitanism, I think, I mean, two two thoughts. First thought is that it if you haven't seen a gametophyte, they're Well, I'm sure that you have, Sylvia, but they're very cute, worth getting on your your hands and and looking for. um Often they could be on other plants coming from a nursery in the soil or something. Look just like a little green flat structure. And you can see like the little bumps of the Archegonian Anthuridium. They're just very sweet. Kind of too two things.
Speaker: Final kind of areas I'd like to to talk with you about. One of them I mean, we've we've talked a bit about it throughout that these references to deep, deep time, ferns witnessing dinosaurs and how ancient these these plants are. For myself, I find like that is something big that I get out of ferns and moths and ancient plants and connecting to deep time gives me a sense of transcendence and also of cycling of elements and connections over time, which is very personally meaningful. And you you write in your book, ferns appear to sit patiently in the background of geologic time, letting others rule the earth until their turn comes around again.
Speaker: Science seems to confirm this. In art and culture too, ferns assert themselves from the shadows in many dioramas and pictorial representations. They represent not only the primordial world, but also its continuity with our world.
Speaker: Surrounded by ferns, it's easy to dream yourself back into prehistory, carried by this tangible connection to the distant past. Can you reflect a bit about this? And um you know part of the reason you got into ferns and thinking about them was was deep time. What's kind of thinking about deep time and researching it, what what does that provide you in your work and life?
Speaker: Yeah, a lot of what you just said is true for me as well. Thinking about this connection with a history that is, I mean, it's difficult enough if you consider it to think about it something like the Middle Ages or antiquity, but try and go back to the dinosaurs and then go back another 250 million years. And this, I mean, it is a kind of exercise in thinking the sublime, like looking at the stars, feeling very small. And it's also difficult to not, or to to resist the temptation of considering ourselves as humans so small that you reject the kind of responsibility that comes with being a human.
Speaker: But... Yeah, what i what I really like about this is this idea that even though we have these geological epochs and eras, history doesn't work in a way where one scene follows the other. So you don't have...
Speaker: the and it seems like that when you when you tell especially the story of the dinosaurs and paleontologists will tell you that there are so many dinosaurs still among us but the the story usually goes on a movie like jurassic park prophets of it that we think of the past as something that is past that is not part of our world anymore and that when things enter our world that should belong to the past like the dinosaurs in jurassic park something is amiss but actually we are part of and kind of haunted by all the things that have ever been on this planet and this planet is not a linear story but it's it's a story of layers it's a story of histories that intermingle with each other and that is something i really like and i mean one of the
Speaker: easiest ways of of telling the story of how primordial ferns are still parts of our lives is to consider how much coal is still burnt, which is basically ancient fern forests. It's so interesting that and Antarctica, for example, was a green lush continent covered in fern trees. until the big climate changes happen. And to consider that there is a continuity that is not dependent on human beings is both important in respect to getting our act together in the face of biodiversity loss.
Speaker: But it's more than saving our own selves. It's more this idea that there is... i don't want to get too mystical about it, but it feels like it. It's like in ferns you can...
Speaker: see and experience and basically touch this continuity of life that really reaches back to the earliest single cell organisms and to see how this goes on without someone making a plan.
Speaker: beforehand and that being a human among ferns and among forests is like Linnaeus did is a work of trying to put order or to impose order on a system that might not even be a system just ah a process that goes on and does things all the time at the same time and in very creative ways again very literally creative ways and that is something that that I really like and I like to live among plants that have known the dinosaurs, as a species, have seen them come and go um might see other things come and go. It's yeah a reminder of the complexity, right? Like the yeah the ferns, the coal, is the it's the bodies of those ferns and it's released back into the atmosphere. And the ferns that lived 300 million years ago
Speaker: don't care about our c climate catastrophe. Like, it's very weird to think about. And it breaks us out of, like, the temporality of our our daily life and how we think about it. Like, it is one of those, it's good for your brain to break out of that, right? It's one of the wonders of of life to connect to to time in that way. And...
Speaker: And think about it. if you if you consider how beautiful ferns are, and if you see fern fossils, um they look very much like the ferns we know today. And then you consider that the beauty of the world is not made for us.
Speaker: the To consider that the whole planet was already so lush and beautiful with no human to see is a kind of... don't know, it's it's weird for humans to deal with that.
Speaker: You know, it's like, so so why was it so beautiful with no one to appreciate it? Because it doesn't need us at all. It doesn't, no fern cares and no other being cares if humans write a book about it. And I think that makes it worthwhile spend time and effort with it to kind of give your attention as a gift to the world around you.
Speaker: That was my conversation with Dr. Solveinitska. Thanks for listening. Plant Kingdom is hosted by me, Catherine Paltz, and our music is by Carl Deiter. Listen to us wherever you get your podcasts and check out our website at plantkingdom.earth.
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