Fern Walk: Walking Fern

Lesson learned: don’t botanize with a five month old puppy.

If I slow down, if I approach the ground, if I seem the least bit interested in anything outdoors–she’s on top of me. Worse, she’s immediately carrying off the object of interest–wildflower, fungus, rock or spider–as if it were a reward I had intended, by my scratching around or getting out the camera–for her to have.

So this is not a great image from up the gorge late in the afternoon when the light was fading. But maybe this fern is new to some of you: Walking Fern. The glade near the back of our land is a great place for a fern walk. I’ll have more fern and moss images I’m thinking in the next few weeks, though bloodroot and hepatica are coming up NOW!

I haven’t checked the latest taxonomy, but when I learned it, it was an Asplenium species, and interesting 1) because it will “walk” by rooting at the tips of the smooth-margined frond, and 2) it will hybridize with several other members of that species in a complicated “triangle” in which the hybrids will hybridize with each other .

But I lapse into botano-gibberish. Have a great weekend, y’all, and see some of you at the Country Store Saturday night where the topic will be our connection (or lack thereof) to nature and the showing of “Mother Nature’s Child.”