• 1. They’re not parasites. They just hold on.

  

  This one is wild. Borneo, 1876. The tree is fine. (Marianne North, Stagshorn Fern and the Young Rajah of Sarawak, Kew)

  A staghorn grows on a tree but takes nothing from it. No soil, no roots in the ground. It makes its own food.

• 2. The ugly brown part feeds the whole plant.

  

  That big flat one. It turns brown. (E.J. Lowe, Ferns: British and Exotic, vol. 7, pl. LXIV, 1859)

  Those flat brown leaves are dead. They die a few weeks after they finish growing. Then they keep working. They catch water and falling leaves and turn it into food. Never cut them off.

• 3. People spent 400 years hunting for the fern flower. Ferns don’t flower.

  

  This is what it has instead. Brown dust. (Lowe, Ferns: British and Exotic, vol. 7, pl. LXIII)

  The legend says it blooms one night a year, and whoever finds it gets happiness forever. Nobody ever found it. Shakespeare wrote about magic fern seeds too. Ferns don’t have seeds either.

• 4. Here’s what everybody missed. It’s heart-shaped.

  

  About three millimeters across. Nobody plants this on purpose. (Bergen & Eastwood, Foundations of Botany, 1901 — drawn from Aspidium, not a staghorn, but this is the stage.)

  Ferns grow from spores. But a spore doesn’t turn into a fern. It turns into a totally different little plant first, and that thing just sits there doing its own thing for a while. Then the fern shows up. The in-between plant is shaped like a heart.

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• 5. No two look alike. The shape is just a record of where the light was.

  

  Different plant. Different shape. (Lowe, Ferns: British and Exotic, vol. 7, pl. LXII)

  They grow into whatever light and space they get. You can’t plan it.

• 6. It grows into the board. Then it makes more of itself.

  

  A staghorn eating a log. Engraved from a photo in 1859. (Lowe, Ferns: British and Exotic, vol. 7, p. 159)

  Eventually the plant covers up the thing holding it on. Then it starts making copies until there’s a whole cluster. Not every kind does this. The common kind does. They live for decades. People pass them down to their kids.

CORRECTION — Aug 5, 2017: An earlier version of this post was posted too early.