Ferns are mostly uncles

Ferns are old. This is the first thing to understand about them. They were on the planet, in roughly the form they are still in, three hundred million years before the first flower opened. Most of the green things in a contemporary forest are flowering plants. The ferns are not. The ferns are the older generation and they do not need flowers because they had figured out how to reproduce before flowers were invented.

I had not known any of this until I started, three summers ago, trying to learn to identify the ferns along the path behind our cottage in Burgundy. There are, by the careful count of a local botanist friend, fourteen fern species along that two-kilometre path. I can now identify eight of them with some confidence. The other six I will probably need another summer or two to be sure of.

The eight I know

Bracken, which is the biggest and most aggressive and which dominates the open sunny patches. Hart's tongue, which is the only one with undivided fronds and which I think is also the most beautiful. Lady fern, delicate and lacy and easily confused with the next one. Male fern, sturdier than lady fern and the most common in the shadier patches. Wood fern, which I confused with male fern for an entire summer. Polypody, which grows on tree trunks rather than on the ground and which I had assumed for years was a kind of moss. Hard fern, which has two distinct kinds of frond in the same plant. And maidenhair spleenwort, which is very small and which I only spotted because the botanist friend pointed at it.

What identification feels like

It feels, mostly, like the patient correction of a thousand small assumptions. I had assumed all ferns were roughly the same plant. They are not. They are as different from each other as oak is from elm. The differences are at the scale of the frond — the shape of the leaflets, the position of the spore-bearing structures on the underside, the texture of the stem, the colour of the new growth in spring.

On the reproductive habits

Ferns do not have seeds. They have spores. The spores are produced on the underside of the fronds, usually in small structures arranged in patterns that are unique to the species and which are, in fact, the best way to identify a fern when the frond shape alone is ambiguous. The reproductive cycle involves a small intermediate gametophyte stage that almost no one ever sees because it is the size of a coin and lives for a few weeks in damp soil.

I cannot fully explain why knowing this matters to me. It does. The path behind the cottage has fourteen quietly ancient organisms on it, and naming eight of them has changed how I walk past the other six.