NORTHERN NATIVES
Fascinated by Ferns
Story and photos by Rhonda Fleming Hayes
Native ferns evoke nostalgia, charm and cool.
V
enture through the vine-covered arch into Susan Warde’s garden in St. Anthony Park on a hot summer day and the temperature seems to drop 20 degrees. Is it all in your head? Partly it’s the high, dappled shade of tall trees overhead, the lush plantings, the glimmer of water from the birdbaths spotted throughout. More so, it’s the many ferns growing among the flowers; they offer psychological AC to the visitor. For Susan, who is a poet as well as a gardener, the appeal of ferns is both nostalgic and aesthetic. When she was a child, her parents’ cabin in upstate New York was perched atop a fern-covered hill. The scent of crushed ferns still evokes that time for her. “I love their fantastic foliage,” she says, “often almost like fractals, and the way their fiddleheads unfurl so promisingly.” She also points to their ancient lineage, evolving millions of years before flowering plants. Ferns are one of the oldest living plant groups, pre-dating dinosaurs. They produced oxygen that paved the way for more life forms.
40 Minnesota State Horticultural Society
