Quotes & Sayings About Ferns

ENTER THIS DESERTED HOUSE
But please walk softly as you do.
Frogs dwell here and crickets too.
Ain't no ceiling, only blue
Jays dwell here and sunbeams too.
Floors are flowers - take a few.
Ferns grow here and daisies too.
Whoosh, swoosh - too-whit, too-woo,
Bats dwell here and hoot owls too.
Ha-ha-ha,hee-hee,hoo-hoooo,
Gnomes dwell here and goblins too.
And my child, I thought you knew
I dwell here ... and so do you. — Shel Silverstein

Time overlaps itself. A breath breathed from a passing breeze is not the whole wind, neither is it just the last of what has passed and the first of what will come, but is more
let me see
more like a single point plucked on a single strand of a vast spider web of winds, setting the whole scene atingle. That way; it overlaps ... As prehistoric ferns grow from bathtub planters. As a shiny new ax, taking a swing at somebody's next year's split-level pinewood pad, bites all the way to the Civil War. As proposed highways break down through the stacked strata of centuries. — Ken Kesey

I divined and chose a distant place to dwell
T'ien-t'ai; what more is there to say?

Monkeys cry where valley mists are cold,
My grass gate blends with the color of the crags,
I pick leaves to thatch a hut among the pines,
Scoop out a pond and lead a runnel from the spring.

By now I am used to doing without the world,
Picking ferns, I pass the years that are left.
The trail to Cold Mountain is faint
the banks of Cold Stream are a jungle

birds constantly chatter away
I hear no sound of people
gusts of wind lash my face

flurries of snow bury my body
day after day, no sun
year after year no spring. — Hanshan

But now she loved winter. Winter was beautiful "up back" - almost intolerably beautiful. Days of clear brilliance. Evenings that were like cups of glamour - the purest vintage of winter's wine. Nights with their fire of stars. Cold, exquisite winter sunrises. Lovely ferns of ice all over the windows of the Blue Castle. Moonlight on birches in a silver thaw. Ragged shadows on windy evenings - torn, twisted, fantastic shadows. Great silences, austere and searching. Jewelled, barbaric hills. The sun suddenly breaking through grey clouds over long, white Mistawis. Ice-grey twilights, broken by snow-squalls, when their cosy living-room, with its goblins of firelight and inscrutable cats, seemed cosier than ever. Every hour brought a new revalation and wonder. — L.M. Montgomery

Ferns can be very aggressive — James S.A. Corey

Then the house had been boldly planned with a ball-room, so that, instead of squeezing through a narrow passage to get to it (as at the Chiverses') one marched solemnly down a vista of enfiladed drawing-rooms (the sea-green, the crimson and the bouton d'or), seeing from afar the many-candled lustres reflected in the polished parquetry, and beyond that the depths of a conservatory where camellias and tree-ferns arched their costly foliage over seats of black and gold bamboo. — Edith Wharton

Ambas and Bobia Islands are perfect gems of beauty. Mondoleh I cannot say I admire. It always looks to me exactly like one of those flower-stands full of ferns and plants - the sort you come across in drawing rooms at home, with wire-work legs. I do not mean that Mondoleh has wire-work legs under water, but it looks as if it might have. — Mary Kingsley

Because we can't escape our ancient hunger to live close to nature, we encircle the house with lawns and gardens, install picture windows, adopt pets and Boston ferns, and scent everything that touches our lives. — Diane Ackerman

The grey nurse resumed her knitting as Peter Walsh, on the hot seat beside her, began snoring. In her grey dress, moving her hands indefatigably yet quietly, she seemed like the champion of the rights of sleepers, like one of those spectral presences which rise in twilight in woods made of sky and branches. The solitary traveler, haunter of lanes, disturber of ferns, and devastator of hemlock plants, looking up, suddenly sees the giant figure at the end of the ride. — Virginia Woolf

But in the closeness of the sewing room, Simon can smell her as well as look at her. He tries to pay no attention but her scent is a distracting undercurrent. She smells like smoke; smoke, and laundry soap, and the salt from her skin; and she smells of the skin itself, with its undertone of dampness, fullness, ripeness - what? Ferns and mushrooms; fruits crushed and fermenting. — Margaret Atwood

All the trees, with all their laden branches; all the shrubs, and ferns, and grasses; the message-carrying air; all these unceasingly were active. — Herman Melville

I did another commercial. Don't lose your loved ones, I wrote, because of excessive radioactivity. Don't be a wallflower at the dance because of strontium 90 in your bones. Don't be a victim of fallout. When the tart on Thirty-sixth Street gives you the big eye does your body stride off in one direction and your imagination in another? Does your mind follow her up the stairs and taste her wares in revolting detail while your flesh goes off to Brooks Brothers or the foreign exchange desk of the Chase Manhattan Bank? Haven't you noticed the size of the ferns, the lushness of the grass, the bitterness of the string beans, and the brilliant makings on the new breeds of butterflies? You have been inhaling lethal atomic waste for the last twenty-five years and only Elixircol can save you. — John Cheever

In neglected fields the fern grows, which must be cleared out by fire. — Horace

When I talk to my friends I pretend I am standing on the wings
of a flying plane. I cannot be trusted to tell them how I am.
Or if I am falling to earth weighing less
than a dozen roses. Sometimes I dream they have broken up
with their lovers and are carrying food to my house.
When I open the mailbox I hear their voices
like the long upward-winding curve of a train whistle
passing through the tall grasses and ferns
after the train has passed. I never get ahead of their shadows.
I embrace them in front of moving cars. I keep them away
from my miseries because to say I am miserable is to say I am like them. — Jason Shinder

The house was burning, the yellow-red sky was like the sunset ... Nothing would be left, the golden ferns and the silver ferns, the orchids, the ginger lilies and the roses ... When they had finished, there would be nothing left but blackened walls and the mounting stone. That was always left. That could not be stolen or burned. — Jean Rhys

The loamy perfume
Of ferns, rain, earth, flees before
Mister poopie pants — Josh Lerman

The inside of the cabin with the fire finally going is still the dear lovable abode now as sharp in my mind as I look at it as an unusually well focused snapshot
The sprig of ferns still stands in a glass of water, the books are there, the neat groceries ranged along the wall shelves — Jack Kerouac

I fell in love with flora of all types, especially ferns. Loved the sparse structure and repetition of shape - almost fractal. — Jack Dorsey

Each place its own mind, its own psyche! Oak, Madrone, Douglas fir, red-tailed hawk, serpentine in the sandstone, a certain scale to the topography, drenching rains in the winters, fog off-shore in the summers, salmon surging up the streams - all these together make up a particular state of mind, a place-specific intelligence shared by all the humans that dwell therein, but also by the coyotes yapping in those valleys, by the bobcats and the ferns and the spiders, by all beings who live and make their way in that zone. Each place its own psyche. Each sky its own blue. — David Abram

The world can give you these glimpses as well as fairy tales can
the smell of rain, the dazzle of sun on white clapboard with the shadows of ferns and wash on the line, the wildness of a winter storm when in the house the flame of a candle doesn't even flicker. — Frederick Buechner

I'm going to imagine that I'm the wind that is blowing up there in those tree tops. When I get tired of the trees I'll imagine I'm gently waving down here in the ferns - and then I'll fly over to Mrs. Lynde's garden and set the flowers dancing - and then I'll go with one great swoop over the clover field - and then I'll blow over the Lake of Shining Waters and ripple it all up into little sparkling waves. Oh, there's so much scope for imagination in a wind! — L.M. Montgomery

From dandelions to daffodils, from ferns to figs, from potatoes to pine trees - every plant growing on land is striving toward two prizes: light, which comes from above, and water, which comes from below. Any contest between two plants can be decided in one move, when the winner simultaneously reaches higher and digs deeper than the loser. — Hope Jahren

I glanced up at the trees too.
Dead. Every one of them gray and white, needles rusted, leaves shriveled at the tips of branches. All the life sucked out of them. Not just the trees. All the plants, ferns, grasses and brush were shriveled, brown, barren.
As if a month of winter had set down right here in my driveway and gone on a killing spree.
...
"Love what you've done with the landscape," Cody said. "You could open your own business, you know."
...
"The hell you talking about, Miller?" I asked Cody.
"Yard care. You're poison and weed whacker all in one. You can call it Death to All Shrubbery. — Devon Monk

It was to Hofmeister, working as a young man, an amateur and enthusiast, in the early morning hours of summer months, before business, at Leipzig in the years before 1851, that the vision first appeared of a common type of Life-Cycle, running through Mosses and Ferns to Gymnosperms and Flowering Plants, linking the whole series in one scheme of reproduction and life-history. — Arthur Harry Church

On the spur of the hill stood the ruins of an old brewery. The roof had long since disappeared and the rain had beaten the stone floors smooth and yellow. Some enterprising Englishman had spent a lifetime here making beer for his thirsty compatriots down in the plains. Now, moss and ferns grew from the walls. — Ruskin Bond

I whirled to see the snake springing up from the ferns and bouncing towards us, fast. This time we turned and ran. Every time I looked around, the snake was still there. I wanted to laugh and scream at the same time. The little creature was ridiculous. It was terrifying, and it was also gaining on us. — Kenneth Oppel

It had rained on some vivid green ferns in Maine and it was quite beautiful. I was moving the camera slightly and studying the ground glass. Looking at those 20 square inches, trying to find out just what were the right elements to include. — John Sexton

On the first day of May the people of the crofter townland are up betimes and busy as bees about to swarm. This is the day of migrating, bho baile gu beinn (from townland to moorland), from the winter homestead to the summer sheiling. The summer of their joy is come, the summer of the sheiling, the song, the pipe and the dance, when the people ascend the hill to the clustered bothies, overlooking the distant sea from among the fronded ferns and fragrant heather, where neighbour meets neighbour, and lover meets lover. — Alexander Carmichael

Back to what? A guy who bails on you when you need him? What's Dane doing now that's more important than helping you? Fighting for the rights of endangered ferns?"
I stiffened and pushed away from him, irritation jolting me out of my fugue-state. "You have no right to judge Dane or my relationship with him."
Jack made a scoffing sound. "That half-assed excuse for a relationship was over the moment Dane told you not to bring the baby to Austin. You know what he should have said? ... 'Hell, yes, Ella, I'll stand by you no matter what you do. Shit happens. We'll make it work. Come home now and get in bed. — Lisa Kleypas

concept: me, sleeping in a forest. flowers grow from my scars. moss fills the lonely parts of me. ferns are growing in the pit of my stomach where fear used to live — L.J. Buchanan

Friday beneath the sky, its little postcards of melancholy
Outside each window,
the engines inside the roses at half speed,
The huge page of the sea with its one word despair,
Fuchsia blossoms littered across the deck,
Unblotted tide pools of darkness beneath the ferns ...
And still I go on looking,
match after match in the black air. — Charles Wright

But if planting deadly ferns at poolside was any indication, then it was clear that the designers of Jurassic Park had not been as careful as they should have been. — Michael Crichton

Maybe in the morning, sunlight would to turn him back into a statue; then I could take Stone out to the forest where he could frolic among the ferns, gurgle at streams, and make friends with the other interesting rocks. — Devon Monk

Sure, humans had invaded an extra-dimensional space with wormholes to points scattered across the galaxy, but they'd remembered to bring ferns. — James S.A. Corey

Audrey kept moving with practiced quickness, stepping over roots protruding over the trail and pushing ferns and branches out of her way. She kept a brisk pace, but Kaldar didn't mind. From his vantage point, he had an excellent view of her shapely butt. It was a butt that deserved some scrutiny.
"If you're waiting for my behind to do a trick, you're out of luck," Audrey called over her shoulder.
"How the hell did you even know?" Did she have eyes on the back of her head?
"Woman's intuition," she told him.
"Aha, so it wouldn't be the fact that I stumbled twice in the last minute?"
"Not at all. — Ilona Andrews

Based on German prototypes, green walls and roofs are a natural idea in Singapore's tropical environment, where mosses, ferns, philodendrons, orchids and other epiphytes literally grow on trees. — Alan Huffman

I practically lived in the woods when I was a kid, avoiding grown-ups and my dysfunctional family, pretending I was half-wolf, a feral child who napped in nests made out of ferns, ate wild blueberries, and wove sticks and feathers into her hair. — Jennifer McMahon

Gilbert stretched himself out on the ferns beside the Bubble and looked
approvingly at Anne. If Gilbert had been asked to describe his ideal
woman the description would have answered point for point to Anne, even
to those seven tiny freckles whose obnoxious presence still continued to
vex her soul. Gilbert was as yet little more than a boy; but a boy has
his dreams as have others, and in Gilbert's future there was always a
girl with big, limpid gray eyes, and a face as fine and delicate as a
flower. — L.M. Montgomery

Broad-faced she-cat stood among the ferns, her tortoiseshell-and-white fur patched and scarred from long-past battles. Her amber eyes gleamed like tiny gold moons; they seemed much brighter than the rest of the she-cat, and Tigerclaw was uncomfortably aware that he could see the leaves and ground on the other side of her. — Erin Hunter

A tree is alive, and thus it is always more than you can see. Roots to leaves, yes-those you can, in part, see. But it is more-it is the lichens and moss and ferns that grow on its bark, the life too small to see that lives among its roots, a community we know of, but do not think on. It is every fly and bee and beetle that uses it for shelter or food, every bird that nests in its branches. Every one an individual, and yet every one part of the tree, and the tree part of every one. — Elizabeth Moon

The faint laughter of winds was always about them and the colors of Mistawis, imperial and spiritual, under the changing clouds, were something that cannot be expressed in mere words. Shadows, too. Clustering in the pines until a wind shook them out and pursued them over Mistawis. They lay all day along the shores, threaded by ferns and wild blossoms. They stole around the headlands in the glow of the sunset, until twilight wove them all into one great web of dusk. — L.M. Montgomery

There are no medium-sized trees in the deep forest. There are only the towering ones, whose canopy spreads across the sky. Below, in the gloom, there's light for nothing but mosses and ferns. But when a giant falls, leaving a little space ... then there's a race - between the trees on either side, who want to spread out, and the seedlings below, who race to grow up. Sometimes, you can make your own space. — Terry Pratchett

The forest is blanketed by the greenest ferns and moss and bonsai-like trees, a wild majesty that beckons hobbits and pixies and elves and dreamers. — Shannon Mullen

Ferns can be very aggressive," Prax said. — James S.A. Corey

I couldn't describe the smells of West Virginia, even if I tried. It has something to do with the leaves composting in the woods, the cold trickle of little creeks and waterfalls, the ferns greening up everything. But somewhere deep below, I can smell the rock and the coal this state is built on. — Heather Day Gilbert

I climbed the hill of firs and looked down over the fields of mist and silver in the moonlight. The shadows of the ferns and sweet wild grasses along the edge of the woods were like a dance of sprites. Away beyond the harbour, below the moonlight, was a sky of purple and amber where a sunset had been. — L.M. Montgomery

The first time I saw hundreds of fiddlehead ferns boiling in an enormous pot I realized what an odd person I must be to hear tiny cries from the mouths of cooking vegetables. — Maureen Seaton

Yet the scene around me had its influence, and a guilty feeling possessed me as I realized that of all present in that place of peace and clean content, I was the only profane thing, an ogre lurking to destroy. The half-grown ferns and evergreen sedge grasses through which the early breeze whispered, would, if I had my way, soon be smeared with the blood of some animal, who was viewing, perhaps with feelings akin to my own, the dawning of another day; to be is last. Strange thoughts, maybe, coming from a trapper, one whose trade is to kill;but be it known to you that he who lives much alone within the portals of the temple of Nature learns to think, and deeply, of things which seldom come within the scope of ordinary life. Much Killing brings ine time, no longer triumph, but a revulsion of feeling. — Grey Owl

Western Red Cedar bark and cones are distinct. The foliage is not coniferous ... the tree has flat intricate fronds that branch out like lace. It droops down, hanging fingers from each branch. In certain lights, it looks like a tree made of ferns. — Ned Hayes

Ula thought that unicorns might sleep in grassy glades with ferns for covering. In summer they might lie on a lawn. We walked round quietly on hands and feet, shaking imaginary horns. Ula pawed the air looking solemn; she made little humming sounds. Being fond of moonlight it was probable that they sang at night. They would eat rose petals with jam, and a little fruit in the summer months. — Ursula Holden

People slice up tree trunks, nail the pieces together into boxy shapes, and then go inside to sleep. Trees use the wood in their trunks for a different purpose - namely, they use it to fight with other plants. From dandelions to daffodils, from ferns to figs, from potatoes to pine trees - every plant growing on land is striving toward two prizes: light, which comes from above, and water, which comes from below. Any contest between two plants can be decided in one move, when the winner simultaneously reaches higher and digs deeper than the loser. Consider the tremendous advantage that wood confers to one of the contestants during such a battle: armed with a stiff-yet-flexible, strong-yet-light prop that separates - and connects - leaves and roots, trees have dominated the tournament for more than four hundred million years. — Hope Jahren

The moon rises. The red cubs rolling
In the ferns by the rotten oak
Stare over a marsh and a meadow
To the farm's white wisp of smoke.
A spark burns, high in heaven.
Deer thread the blossoming rows
Of the old orchard, rabbits
Hop by the well-curb. The cock crows
From the tree by the widow's walk;
Two stars in the trees to the west,
Are snared, and an owl's soft cry
Runs like a breath through the forest.
Here too, though death is hushed, though joy
Obscures, like night, their wars,
The beings of this world are swept
By the Strife that moves the stars. — Randall Jarrell

Swamps where cedars grow and turtles wait on logs but not for anything in particular; fields bordered by crooked fences broken by years of standing still; orchards so old they have forgotten where the farmhouse is. In the north I have eaten my lunch in pastures rank with ferns and junipers, all under fair skies with a wind blowing. — E.B. White

I remember being shocked when I came out from under the focusing cloth after a minute or two being submerged within that, at the startling green color of those ferns. — John Sexton

Rockwood didn't have a movie theater or an IHOP or a strip mall. But it did have two churches, a ramshackle bar, and last (but certainly not least) Wacky Willie's Deluxe Goofy Golf, a barren landscape of wilted ferns and plastic flamingos with peeling paint. Wacky Willie had added the 'Deluxe' when finally ridding the thirteenth hole windmill of a stubborn family of bats after a great and terrible struggle that would forever be known as 'The Fearsome Bat War of Rockwood County' by Willie, but was usually referred to as 'That Time Willie Had to Get Rabies Shots' by everyone else. — A. Lee Martinez

Cedars are terribly sensitive to change of time and light - sometimes they are bluish cold-green, then they turn yellow warm-green - sometimes their boughs flop heavy and sometimes float, then they are fairy as ferns and then they droop, heavy as heartaches. — Emily Carr

...even in her current nervous state Penelope recognized them as Mineola ferns, native to a long island whose name she could not quite recall" -Penelope — Maryrose Wood

In the pursuit of knowledge, follow it wherever it is to be found; like fern, it is the produce of all climates, and like coin, its circulation is not restricted to any particular class. — Charles Caleb Colton

Spring had come once more to Green Gables-the beautiful, capricious Canadian spring, lingering along through April and may in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth. The maples in Lover's Lane were red-budded and little curly ferns pushed up around the Dryad's Bubble. Away in the barrens, behind Mr. Silas Sloane's place, the mayflowers blossomed out, pink and white stars of sweetness under their brown leaves. All the school girls and boys had one golden afternoon gathering them, coming home in the clear, echoing twilight with arms and baskets full of flowery spoil. — L.M. Montgomery

Along the Oregon coast an arm of the Pacific shushes softly against rocky shores. Above the waves, dripping silver in the moonlight, old trees, giant trees, few now, thrust their heads among low clouds, the moss thick upon their boles and shadow deep around their roots. In these woods nights are quiet, save for the questing hoot of an owl, the satin stroke of fur against a twig, the tick and rasp of small claws climbing up, clambering down. In these woods, bear is the big boy, the top of the chain, but even he goes quietly and mostly by day. It is a place of mosses and liverworts and ferns, of filmy green that curtains the branches and cushions the soil, a wet place, a still place. — Sheri S. Tepper

I dreamed a place where I have come to dwell Cold Mountain says it all Monkeys scream, the valley fog is cold My door blends with the color of the peaks I gather leaves and thatch a hut among the pines Dig a pond and lead a trickle from the brook Long ago I left the world behind Eating ferns I pass the years in peace — Hanshan

Come back
believer in shade
believer in silence and elegance
believer in ferns
believer in patience
believer in the rain — W.S. Merwin

In our everyday garden grow the rosemary, juniper, ferns and plane trees, perfectly tangible and visible. For these plants that have an illusory relationship with us, which in no way alters their existentiality, we are merely an event, an accident, and our presence, which seems so solid, laden with gravity, is to them no more than a momentary void in motion through the air. Reality is a quality that belongs to them, and we can exercise no rights over it. — Leo Lionni

Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast. — Hunter Murphy

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door
every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum. — Claire Vaye Watkins

I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature
the names of oaks and ferns, the secret lives of birds, the taste of venison and Ogeechee lime, wax myrtle's smell and rattlesnake's, the contour of bobcat tracks, the number of barred owl cackles, the feel of Okefenokee Swamp water on my skin under a blistering sun.
I search for a vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were peace to be found. — Janisse Ray

There were letters for her at the bureau-one from her brother, full of athletics and biology; one from her mother, delightful as only mother's letters could be. She had read in it of the crocuses which had been bought for yellow and were coming up puce, of the new parlour-maid, who had watered the ferns with essence of lemonade... — E. M. Forster

She surveyed the undergrowth and focused on a cluster of fern fronds curled tightly against the new life they had been given. She often wondered why the fern's new existence was so firmly wound up. But she questioned their response no longer. Oaklee felt every muscle in her body want to curl up in self-protection, to comfort the pain, anger, and fear. — Jesikah Sundin

Wrapped in the deep fragrance of the forest, I listen to the flapping of the birds' wings, to the stirring of the ferns. I'm freed from gravity and float up
just a little
from the ground and drift in the air. Of course I can't stay there forever. It's just a momentary sensation
open my eyes and it's gone. Still, it's an overwhelming experience. Being able to float in the air. — Haruki Murakami

...the woods, when they give at all, give unstintedly, and hold nothing back from their true worshippers. We must go to them lovingly, humbly, patiently, watchfully, and we shall learn what poignant loveliness lurks in the wild places and silent intervales, lying under starshine and sunset, what cadences of unearthly music are harped on aged pine boughs or crooned in copses of fir, what delicate savours exhale from mosses and ferns in sunny corners or on damp brooklands, what dreams and myths and legends of an older time haunt them. Then the immortal heart of the woods will beat against ours and its subtle life will steal into our veins and make us its own forever, so that no matter where we go or how widely we wander we shall yet be drawn back to the forest to find our most enduring kinship. — L.M. Montgomery

Anne, on her way to Orchard Slope, met Diana, bound for Green Gables, just where the mossy old log bridge spanned the brook below the Haunted Wood, and they sat down by the margin of the Dryad's Bubble, where tiny ferns were unrolling like curly-headed green pixy folk wakening up from a nap. — L.M. Montgomery

This was a beautiful, old wood, all massive oak and ash trees finding footing among great slabs of cracked stone. Ferns sprang from rocks and verdant moss grew up the sides of the tree trunks. The air itself was scented with green and growing and water. The light was golden through the leaves. Everything was alive, alive. — Maggie Stiefvater

I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

I watched water dripping off the ferns and the needles of the Western Red Cedar next door. I watched it running in runnels down the bark of the Cherry tree, and I looked at the small droplets of misty water that were accumulating on the broad leaves of the Bigleaf Maple.I touched one of the accumulated droplets, and instantly it was gone. — Ned Hayes

region, which sometimes gave certain areas an almost impenetrable thickness, but I knew the area fairly well and could thread through them easily. Pine trees made up the other half of the forest. Other ground vegetation consisted of lush ferns and grasses. That day, thick, gray clouds padded the skies, giving the forest an appearance — Ty Hutchinson

There used to be a middle way, too, when her attention was focused but vast, and time felt like a limpid pool, ringed by sunlit ferns. An underground spring fed the pool from deep below, creating a gentle current of words that bubbled up, while on the surface, breezes shimmered and played. — Ruth Ozeki

That's what the myrtle means. Myrtle for marriage, ivy for faithfulness, ferns for sincerity, and rosemary for remembrance. — Jude Knight

I utilise all my spare moments. I've read twenty-seven of the Hundred Best Books. I collect ferns. — Max Beerbohm

The forest grows ferns and trees; it cultivates mushrooms and spores; it fosters its creatures from nothingness to more of the mulchy same. And for Jason, the seeds of backbone, of entitlement, were nurtured in the fertile hollow that had dropped the bottom out of civilized advancement. The forest insisted. It pushed back. At some sudden swell of that's-enough, it emphatically refused to be overrun by bullying machinery and someone else's idea of what it should be. — Jamie Mason

I was conscious of that moment of stepping into the woods and leaving everything else behind. That one instant when all the sounds of people, of traffic, of doors opening and closing, were suddenly gone, swallowed up by trees and ferns. It was like a curtain falling on a stage, and I waited for that moment every time. My heart opened just a little bit wider. — Lynn Thomson