Resurrection Ferns of the High Desert

Описание: The first time I ever saw this plant it was being sold in a street market near Jackson Square in New Orleans and being marketed as a "resurrection fern", but it is not technically a fern and soon after being "resurrected" it is undeniable that every individual sold in that street market in New Orleans was then promptly killed within a matter of days. It is damn near impossible to replicate the conditions of the Chihuahua Desert in the Southern Louisiana Swamp, and no doubt every plant in that street market was plucked off of limestone in West Texas in a habitat nearly identical to this one - rocky limestone slopes.

It's not like it matters much though, because this plant is so ecologically successful in the limestone deserts of Texas and Northern Mexico that it basically grows like a weed. It reproduces by spores, not seed. The spores are produced in between the decussate bracts in the sporophylls, technically termed a strobilus, where the flattened "leaves" elongate and form overlapping triangular scales at the distal ends of the foliage.

It does indeed survive drying out, a trait many other members of the genus Selaginella share (like Selaginella arizonica, for instance, in the Sonoran Desert). This plant is able to dry out into a state of dormancy rather than death, and spring back to life within an hour or two of receiving significant enough rain or fog. Its flat rosettes of foliage scale leaves unfurl like a human palm asking for spare change and it greens up and starts photosynthesizing, metabolizing and respiring. I have been in areas of the West Texas Desert where thousands of these cover a hillside like a seafloor covered in corals. A closely related species, Selaginella gypsicola, grows in the high gypsum deserts of Nuevo León on substrates that resemble chunks of salt.

Selaginella is a huge genus, and some species are very much NOT adapted to these desert conditions, instead growing in the understory of tropical forests. They are members of a lineage of organisms known as lycophytes, the ancestors of which once formed the epic and geologically infamous forests of the carboniferous period.

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