Welcome to this week’s Friday phenology
Phenology is the study of biological life cycles and changes in weather as the seasons progress throughout the year. Phenology is a practice of paying attention to our habitats.
On (occasional) Fridays, I share a glimpse of my passing seasons from here in the Georgia Piedmont, where I currently live. At the end of each post, I invite the EarthSpells community to share in the comments from your own corner of the earth. You can join in this grounding practice throughout the year, an experiment in a collective phenology. Even as our seasons shift with a changing climate, through phenology we can practice staying rooted and cultivating a more intimate relationship with the places we live.
“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influences of each.”
— Thoreau in his journal, August 23, 1853
This week, the fertile fronds of the netted chain fern that line the path in my backyard woods here at Big Creek… well, they spoke to me. I wrote the poem below in their voice (and recorded it on audio for you). But a little backstory here first, some naturalist notes:
Some fern species send up fronds later in the growing season that are specifically for making and dispersing spores, distinct from their sterile fronds. I wish I had marked down the date this season that I first saw the fertile fronds—I think they’ve been around a couple weeks now. But now, suddenly, they look like they mean business. Which they do.
The leaflets of the fertile fronds of the netted chain fern are much narrower, and they are lined with rows of chainlike packets of spores (“fruitdots,” in fernspeak, or sporangia). They shoot up taller, much more erect, than the wavy-margined sterile fronds that look relaxed and curve toward the ground.
Ferns produce so many billions of spores each season that they are a component of atmospheric dust. Wind can pick up and lift fern spores into the jet stream; it is thought that this is how ferns originally dispersed to the most remote Pacific islands on earth. When I look up deep into the sky overhead, I often imagine all the fern spores swirling there, unseen. Breathing the air in this season, then, as Thoreau invites us to do, likely means breathing in hundreds or thousands of fern spores.
I hope you enjoy this poem, and I look forward to hearing from you in the comments about your own phenologies this season.
Fertile Frond
Great sky, I see the August light
in you. I leave behind the tattered green of summer,
the sterile fronds that sway with leisure.
I leave behind the tired brown dirt.
I rise. I rise and spread my arms.
I have a billion prayers to make before winter
and there is only so much time.
Time, dear, there is only so much.
I have seen the coming darkness. I have
smelled the coming cold.
I grow taller, stronger. Wind, bow
to me. Wind, bend here to the forest
floor. Send an unseen whirl
to suck these sparks from inside me—
gently, oh, gently—to the troposphere
where I will whisper
the names of the unborn. I hear the unborn crying. I hear
the not-yet soil moaning. I have seen the dragonflies
falling one by one. Oh wind, take my numberless hopes
and fling them into the jet stream. It is time.
Numberless, I said, these hopes and prayers.
Reaper, reap. Make room for me.
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