new growth

Hey everybody, meet Lancelot! He is a sword fern, and I owe him an apology. 

Lance was the first plant I brought home to the this apartment, but he was pretty scraggly back then, and he dropped a lot of leaves on the floor on his way to filling himself out to his current state of very extra flooftasticacity.

Last week I noticed several naked sticks in various parts of the pot, and I grabbed the kitchen scissors to snip them out thinking that these were old things that needed to be removed. As I was snipping away at a dozen of these branches, though, I thought, "Huh, there are no brown leaves on the floor. Where did the leaves go?" 

Then as I was walking to the kitchen trash with a bundle of naked stalks I had just cut, I noticed that they were green and supple, not brown and brittle. And I realized that I had just lopped off a dozen new shoots. Not my brightest moment.

The nubbins I had interpreted as the places where leaves had fallen off were actually the places where leaves were just beginning to poke out. 

Lancelot, thankfully, is a bold knight and has since sent out several more new shoots, and today I caught this tightly rolled leaf getting ready to unfurl. He appears to have forgiven me.

This drama of the ill-timed shearing is a reminder that growth doesn't always look the way we expect it to. To be honest, before this, if you had asked me what growth on a sword fern would look like, I wouldn't have had a good answer. I think I imagined something like the way a wild fiddlehead fern grows by unrolling a fully formed stalk and leaves. 

But Lancelot isn't a fiddle head, he's a sword fern. His new growth doesn't gracefully uncurl bottom to top until it stands upright, it shoots out chaotically in all directions, bare stalks making their way through the floofy ones before unfurling leaves in a random order and flopping into the existing mass of green. This growth is chaotic, this growth takes the clearest path it can find, this growth pushes other older growth out of its way, every new stalk is its own knight errant on an adventure seeking space and sunlight. 

When I first left the US on my own in 2021, and officially became an empty-nester, I knew that I had a journey of personal growth ahead of me, not just a journey of geographic travel. The personal growth journey I imagined for myself was, I think, more like the fiddlehead fern--graceful and relatively orderly. The personal growth journey I've actually had, though, is more like the sword fern--chaotic, random, floofy--and sometimes I've cut off my own new growth because I didn't recognize it for what it was. 

Thanks for the lesson, Lancelot, and sorry about the untimely snips.