This is a very funky fern and I almost walk past without noticing it, as I have done for years. A day of fine weather and clear skies is enough to quicken the pulse and bring a smile to faces set against rain all winter. But that was yesterday; today there's a turn to grey again.
Although I've learned to appreciate the grim beauty of murkiness, the washrag skies and mud so jealous it clings to every step, this emerald vision in the monochrome gloom is startling. At first I think the plant might be a holly fern or a rigid buckler fern because of its stiff bearing out of mossy limestone rocks. As I get close it becomes a polypody, and I think perhaps the western polypody – an intermediate form between the common polypody, which grows on trees and walls, and the southern polypody, which is longer and softer. What is very interesting is that some of the simple comb-tooth-shaped pinnae of the fronds have very un-polypody-like jagged edges.
This would have got the Victorians in a tizz. In their search for novelty and aberrancy, Victorian fern collectors dug up as many weird forms for their gardens as they could find. I admit to similar urges which turn inquisitiveness into acquisitiveness, but can't think of a better place for this fern. How long it's been here I have no idea, and I must have walked past it for years. Only today, in this damp gloom, did it burst into my consciousness like a green firework. Strange how things suddenly become significant. Stranger, how much we miss. A swerve of Sunday cyclists pass a mangled badger corpse on the lane. Shoppers in the street ignore ravens calling and tumbling above the church tower. The bus queue is oblivious to a gull skirmish overhead about spilled chips on the kerb.
The western polypody, if that's what it is, is morphing into something else. As ferns have done for over 300 million years, this one in a crack between evolutionary forms, in the ruins of a limestone quarry wall, in a grey wood under a lowering sky, is the kind of hybrid which subverts our fixed view of nature; strange and beautiful.
