Christmas fern

A layering of sounds I'd never heard arranged this way.

At my feet and everywhere I looked, Christmas ferns seemed placed in clusters as designed perfectly.

I recognized lady slippers from field guides I'd studied in strange houses, their delicate pink pouches like secrets being offered up from beneath the forest floor.

Ragged hellebore lingered in shadowy places, remnants of their spring riot.

What's the one dry, like fully dry, fully shade? You know what she responded with? And I've never planted this before.

You ready? What? Christmas fern.

Oh, never heard of it.

Christmas fern, apparently, Google this, ladies and gentlemen, Christmas fern will take fully dry and fully shade.

Now, there's a caveat.

There's a caveat.

These are just as much in bloom on other winters, but the snow covers them from sight, and it takes a thaw which sweeps the ground clear of snow to reveal them.

It is good now and then to get a green Christmas such as we have just had, for in it we may go forth into the fields and realize that the spring has not retreated to the Bahamas but merely to the subsoil, where it slips full of warmth and thrill on any sunshiny day.

If we will but seek the right places, we need not search long to find April all about us, though they may be cutting ten-inch ice on the pond and winter overcoats be the prevailing wear.

Today I found young and thrifty plants, green and succulent, of two varieties of fern that are not common in my neighborhood and that I had never suspected in that location.

It is set so steep that only the midsummer midday sun overtops its slant, and this the dense hemlock foliage shuts out.

No woodland grasses grow in its dense shadow, and only here and there the partridge berry and the pirola creep down a little from the top of the ridge where some sunlight slips in.

Yet in its densest part the Christmas fern revels and throws up fronds that seem to catch some of their dark beauty from the deep green twilight of the place.

In the spring these stand in varying degrees of erectness, but autumn seems to bring a change in the cellular structure of the lower part of the stipe and weaken it so that the fronds fall flat upon the earth.