online: 6 june 2013 modified: 5, 6 june 2013 26 may 2013 ferns and other miracles
including tadpoles
...this is the place where i asked what has become of the ferns this year (in colder weather than usual)... today (a warm day at last) the answer is before me: the ferns have reappeared... they are all over the bank where i remember them... each vertical stalk with few or no leaves until reaching a third to a half a metre high... they seem to grow quickly from a root not visible above the soil until the temperature is right...
...my question today is how do the ferns detect gravity so accurately to direct the stalk with furled leaves to grow so exclusively upwards?... and how does the chestnut branch just above the ferns detect gravity as instruction to grow almost horizontally... and also how does a growing plant know by what fractions of a millimetre to reduce the thickness of each successive section of a stalk or a branch?... and is there any more to a plant or an animal than a collection of mathematical rules fitting organism to circumstance (the rational findings of scientific thought and observation)... i gather that there is now a growing number of serious thinkers who are looking for evidence of the irrational...
...directed by these questions i get down on my knees to look more closely at the smallest new fern i can see... yes the little stalk is growing directly out of the soil as it propels upward spirally furled leaves to be unrolled in a week or so when the leaves are ready to open at the top of its straight stalk...
...brass band music begins in adjoining park... so it must be three o'clock... for a man in a pale blue blazer with a medal told me that he and his colleagues were going to play from 3 to. 5... he also told me that he used to work in Hyde Park and he left just before he would have been given a medal by the Queen... the medal he is wearing today is something else ('it opens doors for me' he said)... i guess medals are not part of nature... but nature as we see and understand it is partly a projection of 'the human mind'... hm...
...while i was writing that a man with three dogs came to sit on the same seat... he told me that there are tadpoles in the pond alongside Sandy Lane... that there are fewer rabbits than there used to be in this part of the heath... and that there used to be wolves all over Ireland (among other places)... and that red squirrels can survive in pine forests because they can eat pine cones but grey squirrels cannot...
...on my way back i passed the pond with tadpoles... yes there were dozens... swimming in slightly muddy water amongst fallen branches and an abandoned floating nest of a water bird... and on a nearby seat there was a man writing assiduously in a thick notebook...
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