October 13, 2011--mystery fern turns out to be.....

guess what. When I got out of the car at Flower Camp yesterday, it was pouring down rain but there was something incredibly interesting near my car door. It was a single stem of something that looked like a fern frond. But it wasn't familiar. I browsed my brain for which fern it might be, came up with nothing, then even entertained the idea that someone had visited Flower Camp in my absence and left this piece of plant material behind! It was so beautiful, shiny, dark green. Picked it up and looked around for clues as to its source and discovered it--a mimosa that had grown up near Flower Camp gate. I was a tiny bit disappointed--both that I wasn't savvy enough to know a mimosa leaf when I saw it and that a mysterious fern hadn't entered my life. (Last week, John ran into a vine with stinging prickles we'd never encountered before in our river bottom, so I was unusually open to the possibility of finding things at Flower Camp that I'd not encountered in the 35+ years previous). Anyway, as the most interesting thing I'd encountered all day, I dropped my mimosa "frond" into a vase last night. As expected, it was a shriveled mess this morning, but it was fun, thinking for a New York minute, that it was something extraordinary. And BTW: we just had an afternoon shower that resulted in a rainbow stretching from one side of our hillside to the other.

"fronds"

next day