In some botanical gardens, there are massive ferns more than a hundred years old. Death is not built in to these plants as it is for us more specialized life-forms, with the ticking clocks of our telomeres, our liability to mutations, our running-down metabolisms. But youth is apparent, even in ferns. The young Woodsia are charming: a bright spring green; tiny, like babies’ toes; and very soft and vulnerable.
