“For he on honey-dew hath fed, 

And drunk the milk of Paradise.”

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”

When I emerge from the tangled mass of bifurcated fronds, each covered in the fine and fur-like hairs known as trichomes, I feel as though I’ve stumbled back from some altered state of consciousness, blinking into the light of a late-Spring morning in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas. For going on an hour now, I’ve had my face and upper body pressed into the embracing tendrils of a giant staghorn fern that hangs on our porch, just outside our bedroom window. I have been deep in concentration.

It’s my own fault that I’ve had to do this, I know. The plant, one of my favorites in the near thicket’s-worth of houseplants I’ve kept over the years, spent the winter in our daughter’s light-filled bedroom while she was away in college. Like many staghorns, it requires little moisture during the cold and dormant winter months, and so the plant was easy to ignore. I shouldn’t have ignored it. When it came time to transition the staghorn out from the bedroom, I discovered that it had become infested with the dreaded, sap-drinking insect scourge known as scale. 

Because I didn’t catch the infestation early, today I must wield the organic gardener’s most fearsome weapon against the armor-like scale: a cotton swab dipped in isopropyl alcohol. Touch its astringent tip to a scale and the little waxy dome, under which the insect lives, slides loose from the plant. But—here’s the rub: there are hundreds of them. They tend to hide in the folds and creases of the fronds. Had the plant been outside, I might have noticed a tell-tale rivulet of ants that would have flowed in to feed on the sugary substance, known as “honeydew,” that the scale secretes. 

Scale are mobile when they hatch, but only briefly. They spend that time seeking out a plant on which they can attach and feed. In some species of scale, ants, which they have a mutualistic relationship with, carry the immature scale to another sap-rich plant where the ants will harvest the honeydew and guard the scale from predators. Several of the sources I consult recommend disposing of infested plants before the scale can spread. I’ve been around plants long enough to see the brutal wisdom of this advice, but I love this particular staghorn—a platycerium bifurcatum—and I am determined to save it. If my plan is going to work, I will have to go into battle with the scale many more times over the coming weeks.  

It seems as though I’m always re-learning the lesson of how essential it is to spend time with your plants regularly. Today, I have communed with this staghorn as never before. Coming back to the familiar world of our porch, I feel disoriented. I used to experience a somewhat similar—although much less pleasant— feeling, when I’d emerge from a long video call during the Pandemic. I’d return from those sessions of talking out loud in an empty room, with the disconcerting sense that I’d just spent hours in a place that didn’t exist. The interior of this fern, however, while otherworldly, is decidedly, wonderfully real.  

***

Nearly fourteen hours pass, but when I close my eyes to sleep, I am plunged immediately back into the fronds. I see the trichomes covering them in a layer resembling dust; I see the little lacquered buttons of the scale, the tip of the cotton swab. These soon evaporate and are replaced by a treeline tossed by wind, a seething mass of leaves and shade across which, suddenly, tines of lightning have begun to fork. The shadow of a cloud scurries through the foreground. The treeline drops away. It is raining. Through a curtain of drops, I see a brass band lifting its instruments in unison to play. Out of them, the boomerang shapes of chimney swifts come whirling. A matchstick bursts into flame then shrivels to the charcoal trunk of a sapling. This too vanishes. The number 7 appears, disintegrates. And now a field shimmers into view; fireflies lifting from its tall grass at twilight, lit on the ascent, rising and floating, and beyond them, an aperture opens and closes, a window through which—now I see it—an object is speeding fluidly, whitely away, flickering like a square of light, a handkerchief made of silk, or a page, perhaps, upon which something… 

staring back at me  

from a forked tomato stem 

the tiniest frog