Who’s Afraid of a Lovely Fern?

I didn’t want the staghorn fern, but the thought of owning one made my husband, Tom, so happy. On the way to our friend’s house to pick it up, he bounced in the passenger seat like a child bound for the circus as I — heart pounding, hands sweating — gripped the steering wheel.

Tom had no idea. I hadn’t told him what the staghorn fern triggered in me because I didn’t know myself. The whole thing felt silly. It’s just a plant with large fronds that look like elk antlers. Typically seen indoors, the staghorn fern only does well outside in the warmer climates of Australia, Southeast Asia, Africa (where it’s native) or Florida, where we live.

Here, it thrives in the heat and humidity, growing much larger than its houseplant relatives. Many of the live oak trees in our neighborhood are festooned with bromeliads and epiphytes like staghorn ferns, orchids and Spanish moss.

In the 20 years since Tom and I moved here, he has turned our yard into a native plant wonderland, replacing the grass with coontie, beautyberry, firebush, yaupon holly, wild coffee and Simpson’s stopper. Raised in New York, Tom had little interest in moving to Florida, but a good job beckoned me, and eventually he got one too.

Much like the staghorn, Tom has flourished here, and gardening has become his spirit work, making a home for birds, bees and butterflies — and our small family.

To this menagerie, he now wanted to add a staghorn fern. He was the first to reply to our friend Laura’s group message saying that a three-feet-wide piece had broken off from her much larger specimen and was free to anyone who would come pick it up.

In the store, a chunk like that could cost over a hundred dollars. The plant remaining in Laura’s yard, decades old and nearly five feet across, might fetch more than a thousand.

“Bring two people,” Laura said. “It’s heavy.”

So off we set on a Sunday morning, Tom eager to feature a statement plant in our wonderland — and me mysteriously dreading its presence.

Irritated, I tried to pick a fight. I was already showered and dressed for shopping. Getting the fern meant getting dirty, showering again and changing clothes twice. “It’s so hot,” I said. “You should have given me a heads up.”

Tom let my sniping pass, one way we’ve learned to sustain our 25-year marriage. Another is making sacrifices: large ones like moving for a spouse’s job and small ones like doing a dirty chore to make a partner happy. But my anxiety remained.

As I drove, Tom described a story he had read that morning about Willie Nelson. When he mentioned the singer’s name, something clicked.

“I’m sorry,” I said, interrupting him, “but I have to tell you this.” And out tumbled a waterfall of unexpected words, Tom’s country music chatter tying the staghorn fern to memories from my adolescent years in Birmingham.

Like my husband, my mother loved plants. She grew up poor, got pregnant with me, and, after my father took off, did her best to make a life for us on a secretary’s salary. When I was a teenager, we lived in a roach infested, ticky-tacky apartment in a rough part of town. But we might as well have lived in a garden.

My mother filled the apartment with philodendron and spider plant, ficus and fern. They grew in terra-cotta pots surrounding the furniture, hung from the ceiling in elaborate macramé, twisted through lattice and guard rail on the balcony. My mother’s prized plant, displayed like a portrait above our dining room table, was a staghorn fern.

“Dining room” is a fancy term for the alcove next to our kitchen, like “table” is fancy for the dump-scrounged picnic table where, on weeknights, we ate our meals and, on weekends, my mother and her friends gathered to smoke, drink and sing country songs.

The staghorn presided over many good times. Every Friday, my mother and her gang of desk clerks and steel workers would cast off the week’s indignities by clinking beer bottles to Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It.” The evening’s end usually found them crying to whiskey shots.

But those good times often got out of hand. My adolescence was a litany of drunkenness, craziness and sometimes frightening abuse.

“I’m a good ol’ boy,” Waylon Jennings drawled on the radio the time my mother’s boyfriend pulled me across the picnic table to spit-curse in my face. Months later, the same man put a gun to my mother’s head, clicking the trigger through chambers we didn’t know were empty.

“You’re always on my mind,” a neighbor boy whisper-sang in my ear before bending me over the table and stabbing his tongue into my mouth. I haven’t been able to listen to Willie Nelson’s song, or any country music, since.

For Tom, letting go of that music during our relationship’s early years was a relatively easy sacrifice. We used to take long road trips, out west or up the east coast, fantasizing where we might someday make a home. Tom loved the poetry of classic country lyrics, the scratchy sounds of late-night AM radio, and a Southern accent’s twang.

I think my twang is what initially drew him to me, but I was not a country girl. Any time Willie or Waylon came on the radio, my hand automatically hit the off button.

“Nope,” I’d say. “Not going back there.”

I left the south to escape the violence and fear for which country music provided the soundtrack. After becoming the first in my family to finish college, I moved to New York for graduate school. Relatives teased me about going for my “Mrs.” degree, which couldn’t have been further from the truth. Marriage was the last thing I wanted.

Then I met Tom, the most gentle, grounded person I have ever known. He loves the city but is most at home in the natural world. He knows Latin botanical names of plants, can explain Linnaean taxonomy, grows heirloom vegetables from seeds. Pets and babies gravitate toward him.

Tom has consoled me through years of tears as I have come to terms with my traumatic teenage experiences. But he never knew about my problem with staghorn ferns — and neither did I. It wasn’t until we were driving to Laura’s, when Tom’s offhand comment about Willie Nelson sent a shiver up my spine, that I suddenly made the connection. The staghorn fern had stood watch over it all.

Before, when seeing a staghorn, I would involuntarily shudder and turn away. For two decades I have walked into the street to circumvent our neighbor’s staghorn without knowing why. Now, Tom and I were on our way to a friend’s house to pick one up. To live in our yard. Where I would have to look at it every day.

After hearing me out, Tom said, “Do you want to turn around?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just a plant.”

A lovely plant. Under its succulent antlers lie layers of heart-shaped fronds in colors ranging from honeydew to cinnamon. Under those, holding together the staghorn and its plantlet “pups,” is a thick ball of peaty dirt.

“Can you smell that?” Tom asked as we drove the staghorn home from Laura’s in the back of our Subaru. He inhaled deeply. “Ah, clean. Earth and roots.”

We ultimately hung it from a live oak in the easement, across the street from the neighboring staghorn that I have sidestepped all these years. Tom and our 21-year-old son had to rig a system of rope pulleys to lift it as I watched from our air-conditioned living room.

Tom keeps asking me if I’m sure that I want to keep it.

I do. I’m not sure why, but the plant no longer takes me back to the Birmingham I tried to leave behind.

Perhaps the staghorn has taught me a lesson about learning to thrive in a new location. Its fronds, twisted and cramped from weeks of lying on the ground at Laura’s, have started to fan out. Maybe I have found reassurance from watching Tom nurture into the grooves of an oak tree’s bark the roots of a pup that fell off during the move. Or maybe my feelings have changed from attending to what I tried for more than half my life to avoid.

Our neighbor told us that staghorns like potassium, so we started throwing banana peels into the thicket of antlers at our plant’s top. Each morning, I can walk without shuddering past all the different staghorns on our block.

The plants bring order to our row of wild Florida yards. The branches of the live oak trees that house them reach across and touch, creating a canopy that comforts, cools — and, yes, heals.

Julie Buckner Armstrong, a writer and professor in St. Petersburg, Fla., is the author of the forthcoming memoir “Learning from Birmingham.”

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