A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
maidenhair
Maidenhair is a fern with fronds carried on wiry black stems so thin and so glossy that they look like polished hair, holding small fan-shaped leaflets that flutter in almost no air movement. It grows in shaded damp places, on dripping rock, in gorges, and beside waterfalls, and the leaf surface sheds water so completely that a frond held under a stream comes out dry.
Etymology
The English name is for the black stems. The Latin genus name is Greek for unwetted, and it names exactly the property that makes the plant memorable: The leaf will not take water. Pliny recorded the same observation and remarked that the fern could be plunged into water and come out unchanged, which is the sort of detail that survives two thousand years because anyone can check it.
Notes
The unwettable surface is a fine wax structure that holds a layer of air against the leaf. The maidenhair tree is Ginkgo biloba, named for its leaf, which is fan-shaped and notched in the same way as a maidenhair leaflet, and which is the only surviving member of a lineage that has otherwise been gone for millions of years.