Many years ago my grandfather gave me a resurrection plant that he bought at a roadside tourist stand along the highway in Arizona. It was a strange little balled up thing, brown and seemingly lifeless, debris really. But when I put it in a bowl of water it amazingly opened up, uncurled from the fist of debris it was.

As soon as it was unfurled, I got bored and dried it out on the heat vent so I could watch it unfurl again. After probably one-too-many dehydratings and rehydratings it finally died, refused to open or close. If I remember correctly it was over a month before the abuses of this amateur botanist took their toll.

I only learned later that this plant was actually a fern, Selaginella lepidophylla to be exact. Native to the Chihuahuan Desert, it can survive months, and some sources say, even years of total desiccation. But it couldn’t take my abuses. I’m much better with plants now, not so interested in testing their endurance. I’m moving decidedly away from zonal denial.

My grandfather gave me more than a dried up old fern. He gave me a deep and abiding interest in the green world. He spent the last working years of his life as an estate gardener, like I do now. He had spent much of his life outdoors engaged with nature. As a youth he hung phone lines in the jungles of Brazil where he was born. He worked as a logger in Alberta. Farmed in South Texas and sheep ranched in Montana. He even travelled to the Yakima Valley to pick fruit during the Depression.

The worst years of his life he told me were when he had a factory job in Milwaukee.

He has been gone over 30 years now, but still he is with me. Especially when I rake. He taught me to rake. Or when I am out hiking and I can here his oft-repeated axiom: Stop, Look and Listen. He showed me not only how to look at nature, but how to love it. He wasn’t a churchgoer but quoted Confucius, and used Indian fairy tales to elucidate his life views. Still he seemed closer to god to me than anyone I knew.

When he gave me that dried up fern so many years ago, it was more than a botanical lesson. He was showing me his version of the resurrection, not the Christian resurrection, but the constant resurrection of nature. At this time of year when we celebrate death in all it’s gore and horror, I like to look as the leaves fall. It is only a beginning.

These rotting poppy pods burst with new life in this very warm and rainy November here.