A long break from blogging - moving house has taken up a lot of time and energy over the last couple of months.
Our new home has a bigger garden than our old one, with quite a few exotic sub-tropical plants. Exotic to my untrained eye, that is - though among the few that I did recognise straight away were a couple of tree ferns of the same sort that grow to truly majestic proportions at Trebah.
I was curious to find out more about these, not least how to look after them properly. And in researching them, I discovered that the first tree ferns in Cornwall are said to have arrived in ships - possibly convict ships - returning from Australia in the 19th century, which used them as ballast for the return voyage. In Australia, they're sometimes called 'old man ferns' (in the same way as a particularly large kangaroo is known as an 'old man kangaroo').
Tree ferns have much of their root system contained in their trunks, which are cleverly designed to snag vegetation dropping from the forest canopy and turn this into nutrients. And amazingly, when they were jettisoned around harboursides in Cornwall these plants began to put out new fronds (or 'flushes', as they are known).
All this got me thinking, and the result was a poem:
Tree Fern
Old man fern knows a trick or two.
He’s got deep pockets, sly sleeves.
He’ll pick up on the flop, catch
greenbacks the forest highrollers drop.
Nothing’s lost on him, no old growth
wasted but bound by root-web into
his porous trunk, his own rich ground.
He can bluff with the best of them, play
dead when need be. Chopped and slung
in the hold of a convict hulk, ballast
from Van Diemen’s Land, he rocked
in the reeking dark for fifteen weeks.
Dumped by a Cornish quay, soaked
in a strange, cool rain, he felt
a pale sun’s blush, then spread
his winning hand, a royal flush.
Tom Scott
