Little Seed
Wei Tchou
Wei Tchou, whose memoir, Little Seed, was published by A Strange Object in May. (Credit: Bess Adler)
Spores
Ferns begin with spores instead of seeds. A spore is a single-celled reproductive unit capable of generating life on its own, without sexual interaction. This is what distinguishes the fern from the nonfern. Trees, cacti, flowers, and vegetables require fruit and the lavish colors of flowers to attract birds, bats, and honeybees to reproduce—they are reliant on the community of other creatures to create a new generation. But ferns don’t ascend into fervent color each spring, they don’t rely on pollen to be carried from anther to pistil, they don’t wrap a seed in fruit. Instead, they set golden dust into the wind, each microscopic speck a potential new fern borne over stretches of ocean and desert.
Reproducing by spores has meant that ferns are often the first species to repopulate razed areas, carried terrific distances by breezes, over land and sea. They make a home of catastrophe: hurricanes, forest fires, a fallen tree, their spores propagating easily on the freshly agitated soil. After the volcanic eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980, for instance, the ashen, rocky outcrops were soon grown over by the tangled beginnings of ferns, their leaves unfurling like afternoon shadow—the spores of at least one species had crossed the Pacific Ocean from Japan.
Until the invention of the microscope, the reproductive cycle of ferns was hidden from observation, which stoked wild speculation about magic, that fern seeds were of another realm. While flowers and trees produced observable fruit and seeds, ferns had gold dust on the backs of their leaves. Preindustrial Western cultures spun fables about the lengths one had to go to collect fern seed, and the glories one might experience upon doing so.
From Little Seed by Wei Tchou. Published by A Strange Object. Copyright © 2024 by Wei Tchou. All rights reserved.
