Ferns are an ancient division of vascular plants. They do not have the ability to produce seeds, like more advanced vascular plants, but they reproduce by spores. If you’ve ever looked at the back of a fern leaf, maybe you have noticed small brownish structures, sori (singular: sorus) – these are the aggregations of spore-producing structures, sporangia.
Ferns are most abundant in the tropical rainforests, some species live in the temperate zones, and only few are found in cold regions.
I generally love homes full of plants, and I love ferns’ shapes and decorative characteristics, so when I stumbled upon young ferns in a grocery store, I was thrilled. I bought one of them and brought it home, full of faith as I imagined it to grow large and brighten that corner of our home.
But the truth is, some leaves turned brown only after several days. We shifted it to a place with more shade, watered it more, sprinkled its leaves with water, but it was drying even faster than before. We were now desperately sprinkling it every time we were passing by, as it took only 10-20 minutes to absorb all the water. Humidity in our home is quite low and keeping the fern alive in those conditions turned out to be impossible.
After that, plants that require high humidity are unfortunately not an option in my home.
Maybe that is why every time I walk in the woods and stumble upon ferns, I notice them – all of them completely green, strong and healthy.
And that is not the case only with ferns. For example, fig trees often don’t succeed in yards, and that is why I can’t help but notice wild fig trees in some of the most unusual places – bare rocks, old rooftops, hanging from a waterfall or thriving with the roots entirely drowned in the river.
Every time I see wild plants like that, I catch myself thinking how they survive here, in such unpredictable conditions, if their cousins that live in a controlled environment and are carefully taken care of, often don’t survive.
But the answer is clear. If the conditions are not good for a certain wild plant, it simply won’t survive. We usually don’t see the ones that struggle because they couldn’t stay alive. Only the ones that find the existing conditions suitable enough, survive and thrive. If the air was too dry for the ferns on the photograph, they simply wouldn’t be there.
We, people, love to decorate our world according to our taste, and that includes bringing other species from their habitats to entirely different places with diverse conditions.
As I forgot that the air in my home was completely unsuitable for a young fern, and focused only on its possible decorative role (which at the end turned out to be impossible), people often take or buy certain species and bring them to a place that is incompatible with their needs, concentrating only on their physical appearance, decorative purpose, or symbol of prestige or wealth.
One example that immediately comes to my mind, and one of the personally most upsetting examples, is a lone bear that lives in the backyard of one restaurant, fed with food scraps, surrounded by a fence so that visitors can see it. It was brought there just because this animal species is the symbol of that restaurant.
Here, the symbol that the bear represents (bear = restaurant) was far more important to people than ethics.
This is an extreme example, but there are many more cases, more or less severe than this one.
Possible problems that sometimes occur are inconsiderate human actions, such as buying foreign animal species as pets and then releasing them into the wild, where they are not indigenous, and where they may cause various problems.
The same problem can arise with foreign plant species.
You can find more about invasive species in this post:
But, let’s go back to our ferns from the beginning of the text.
Nature really knows best how to support this incredible number of different species on Earth. Natural conditions are maybe not ideal from our point of view, as we often think that we can offer more perfect conditions. People often think that they can create more perfect conditions, but they watch the world from the human perspective (the bear will be better here than somewhere in the wild – it has lots of food, it has no enemies here, how can that be bad for it?).
But natural conditions are good enough for most of the species living in a certain area – even with a slight change in conditions, the living world will most surely adapt.
I think that the best thing that we can do is leave nature alone. As long as people don’t meddle with it*, it will be perfectly fine.
*this includes thoughtless, self-centered, and harmful human actions, and excludes scientifically based efforts in conservation and restoration of nature.
Literature
Nikolić, T. (2013): Sistematska botanika – raznolikost i evolucija biljnog svijeta. Alfa d.d., Zagreb, 1-882.