Progress


For some 80 million years (a blip on the time scale of evolutionary history) an all but forgotten group of fern-like plants initiated the advance of plant sex from spore to seed. Collectively known today as seed ferns (or pteridospermales if you’re that geeky), these plants made it possible for all plants who followed to move a little further away from the source of water from whence they came. They’re no longer around today, these seed ferns. They were swallowed into the abyss of extinction many hundreds of millions of years ago, perhaps close to the time Christmas ferns were unfurling their first fiddleheads. But you can feel their presence.Find yourself a place to sit and watch a bit of algae sway in a pool of water, and consider the beginning of life on Earth for plants. Go to a place of dampness, where liverworts and mosses and ferns surround you. Find a shady nook where violets bloom underneath fragrant Fraser magnoias. Marvel at a grove of paw-paws. Tell me this isn’t a miracle, to be in such a place that displays this botanical progression from the beginning to this here and now. ~K 


 

 

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