Thursday, August 9, 2007

There is no end to the odd things that New Yorkers do on Saturday morning...

...Police officers stopped their patrol car and watched with suspicion, or with bewilderment—until they caught sight of the T-shirts many of us were wearing which bore slogans such as “American Fern Society” or “Ferns Are Ferntastic.”

We were assembled for a meeting of the American Fern Society, which had joined with the Torrey Botanical Society for a Saturday-morning Fern Foray. These forays, which have been going on for more than a century, are usually in somewhat more bucolic sites, but this time we had no goal beyond the Park Avenue viaduct, which, with its crevices and crumbling mortar, is a perfect place to see chink-finding, xerophytic ferns—ferns that, unlike most, can stand long periods of drying out and come to life again after a good rain.

From "Botanists on Park" by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker