There are few plants that can be said to be most effective in the shade – but this applies to ferns in two senses: as a remnant of prehistoric times, they grow in gardens and forests with little light, and inside the earth, sediments have pressed them over millions of years into coal and oil, the burning of which threatens human survival today far more than its own. The procreation of these plants, which reproduce in secret, has long been the subject of all kinds of speculation. Their seeds were said to have magical properties: that they taught us the language of animals and that anyone who encountered the devil could use them to buy their freedom.
In spring, it is always fascinating to see how each leaflet unfurls individually along the pinnate spindle, revealing its fractal arrangement, which is regarded as a sign of absolute beauty – and may have triggered the fern fever in Victorian England: a passion for the excessive collection and cultivation of these wondrous plants, the creation of fern gardens in tenements and sanatoriums and, last but not least, the import of exotic species from all over the world.
Solvejg Nitzke explores old cemeteries, secret gardens and the backyard of her Dresden home in the footsteps of these legendary secret carriers. The result is an illuminating portrait of a shadow-loving plant that can no longer be overlooked by anyone who has ever bent down to look at it.
United Kingdom, United States, Canada
Non-fiction
Solvejg Nitzke is a literary and cultural studies scholar and currently holds the Chair of Comparative Literature at Ruhr University Bochum. She researches precarious natures in popular literature and culture of the 19th century, climate and catastrophes, science fiction and conspiracy narratives. In 2025 her book Making Kin with Trees. A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care will be published by Palgrave Macmillan.
