Tree Ferns & Survival
Hello Plant Lovers!
We hope this letter reaches all of you safe and happy. This year has definitely been difficult for many of us, however we got lucky - we had our first child in September and he is a fat and happy baby! César Sequoia is keeping us busy, and he is a great distraction from a dismal pandemic.
Since many of us are in survival mode these days, we thought we would talk about some of the oldest plants in the world, plants that have endured countless trials in their 360 million year adventure.
When the first plants emerged from water, they had to figure out how to support themselves upright. Early land plants were generally less than a foot tall. Then more than 300 million years ago, ferns began to grow into the size of small trees.
Tree ferns may look like they have a woody trunk, but this trunk is actually a modified rhizome, a root system given structure by the plant's tissue from previous seasons. Everything grows from the apex of the tree; the fiddlehead stems, roots, and leaves all start at one point. The delicate fronds stretch up and out like the crown of a palm tree, and the roots weave their way down forming ever more complex nets as they reach the ground.
This means there is no hard wood in the girth of the tree, but rather wet, fibrous plant tissue.
So if a wildfire passes through, fern trees have a better chance of surviving. This photo was taken by Instagram user Cyn Bodycote after the wildfires in Australia last year. Check out The Insider for more details.
The complex trunk is like its own mini ecosystem - alive with mosses, translucent filmy ferns, seeds from other trees, and possibly lichen. Sometimes a seed from a neighboring tree will sprout inside the trunk of the fern. Seedlings can eventually overtake a tree fern, growing over and consuming it.
Yet sometimes when a tree fern falls, its entire trunk becomes a horizontal root lying across the forest floor. New growth sprouts upward along the original tree. When you get knocked down, you can get back up again.
Usually we would have seen you all at an art festival or local market, and shared our fern ring with you then. Since we probably didn't get a chance to come to your neck of the woods this year, we wanted to give you a coupon for $40 off the fern ring. We think this was our best design all year, and we want to make it easy for you to get one for yourself or a loved one. Enter the code 202040SILVER for the sterling silver ring, or 202040GOLD for the 14k gold ring. (Coupon no longer valid) Please keep in mind that while this coupon is valid for the rest of the year, if you want to receive it in time for the holidays please order soon.
We hope to see some of you next year, in the meantime take care of yourselves and each other.
-Sara & César & Baby Ceze
