1.

DURING THE POLAR VORTEX OF 2013, on most of the winter mornings I was not teaching, I took my toddler daughter to the local conservatory. Together, we walked among the plants in the humid warmth. Our time there ranks among my sweetest memories of her childhood.

Still, I remember it as a desperate season. I was in my forties, a new mother, and teaching full-time on a tenure clock. I signed over all my take-home pay for child care. Given how frantic and exhausted I was, caring for my child myself would have been simpler, rather than working to give the money to another person to do it, but I also loved teaching. And when your subject matter is poetry, full-time jobs are few and far between. I did not feel I could let the position go.

The woman to whom I gave most of my money, a graduate student poet, was in a desperate situation of her own. In a weird trick of “caregiver math,” once my paycheck was signed over, it became barely enough for her to live on. She had my take-home pay, but I still held the health care benefits and a working spouse. When I had a minor surgery, she asked me to save any leftover OxyContin for the next time she developed a kidney stone and could not afford a trip to the ER. She did her laundry in our basement as she and our toddler built a zoo using plastic animals and blocks.

We weren’t sure what to call her position. She wasn’t a full-fledged nanny, but she was in her early thirties, old enough to rightly chafe at the term babysitter. We could have called her a caregiver, but the term was too clinical-sounding to describe who she was, a woman who chased my daughter and tickled her through her sheets of long dark hair, who took her to the zoo and out for her first taste of ice cream. (When did we start using the word caregiver, anyway?) Our daughter solved it: she was simply Gra, then Gret-chen, herself.

On the days I could be alone with my daughter, I ached. I had missed her. I wished that I had seen her eyes widen when the first cold spoon of ice cream touched her lips. But in these moments, I also panicked. I was behind on my grading. I was always shorting someone: my child and husband, my students and colleagues. My parents were aging in another state; I shorted them too. I shorted my sister. I felt like the character Kramer on Seinfeld, always bursting wild-eyed through a door, a few minutes late for my class, a meeting, coming home to make dinner for my family.

Time went on, and Gretchen and I hit ever new levels of absurdity in our perpetual bargain for money and time. I traded her a last-minute recommendation letter and two pieces of pizza in exchange for playing with our toddler as I wrote. I gave her a brand-new toaster oven I didn’t have time to return. We were two halves each trying to be whole.

On these winter mornings with my daughter, though, I could finally slow down. I took deep gulps of warm air. I loved her, she loved me, and we both loved the conservatory, our respite from the outside world.

2.

THIS CONSERVATORY WAS BUILT IN Saint Paul, Minnesota, from a kit made and shipped from Tonawanda, New York, at the beginning of World War I. Like the other conservatories built at that time in the American Midwest, it was a bet placed by the citizenry that their city was important and here to stay.

But a conservatory is not a garden.

Gardens are at least as old as our invention of agriculture, though the dream of the garden might be even older than that.

Conservatories are only as old as the Italian Renaissance, and born from the desire to eat oranges in the winter, and then to shelter plants that don’t grow where you live.

I am possessed by this conservatory and all the others I have managed to visit in the United States and Europe. While they have never been my destination, I always go if I find myself near one. I keep a wish list: the Phipps in Pittsburgh, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh in Scotland, several others. I am taken by the way their iron skeletons, glass, and plants—orchids, ferns, palms, cycads—play off one other: sunlight and shadow, the constructed against the organic, the imagined against the real.

A conservatory is a wish.

I am no longer afraid to die. I am fuel.

3.

BEFORE I WAS A MOTHER, I was a woman who carried a notebook everywhere she went. At the conservatory one afternoon, I wrote down the names of all the ferns in the room my daughter and I are in now.

Whisk. Blue rabbit’s foot. Hart’s tongue.

The staghorn. A small one grows up there, over the doorway from the fern room into the conservatory proper. According to Oliver Sacks, who loved ferns and published his journal from a fern trip to Mexico, staghorns can grow to be more than five hundred pounds and pull down the trees they live in.

The autumn fern I prefer to imagine outdoors, where it begins in a compelling shade of coppery red, a flash of October every spring.

It took me a while to figure out that “fiddlehead” does not refer to a variety of fern. Fiddlehead is an adjective, a description of what a fern frond looks like in the early spring when it comes out of the earth—like the scroll carved at the end of a violin. The fronds curl inward to protect their stems until they are thick and strong enough to straighten out. Fiddleheads are children.

Oliver Sacks says that fiddleheads are “tense with contained time, like watch springs, with the future all rolled up in them.”

Random note in the margin of my notebook page: **See filmy fern in person someday! Delicate / gutsy! Only one cell thick so lives in wet areas / near waterfalls.

Always I feel great affection for maidenhair ferns, which make me think of my daughter’s hair.

I also feel great gratitude for my writing teacher John O., because he taught me that a journal could be so much more than a diary, and that is one reason I had my notebook with me at all.

The first fern I briefly lived with was a Boston fern whose pot my mother cradled in beaded macramé, then hung near the window over the toilet. The fern lived there for only a single afternoon, when my father came home from work, entered the bathroom, then immediately carried it out, saying that he was clearly the only male who lived in our house. But I promised myself that I would live with more ferns when I grew up.

4.

THE FERN COLLECTION AT THE conservatory used to be housed in a tiny and enchanting grotto, but thanks to a recent addition to the building, its one hundred varieties of ferns now spread out in a full-sized room of their own. The new room remains a magical place, with a pool and water trickling down rocks, and I want my daughter—who stands less than three feet tall, at eye level with many of the plants—to remember winter mornings here as a magical time, although any memory she has of it will dissolve, or at least shatter into fragments as she ages. But you don’t have to consciously remember something for it to matter.

AND MY MENTORS ARE DYING. They remind me of stars, whole lifetimes winking out before the light and lack of it reaches Earth. Many of them read enormous numbers of books, and all of them accumulated a vast array of experiences, and so many of them are gone years before I realize it.

People resurface, people I’ve not thought of in ages. The children’s choir director. The nurse practitioner at the college health clinic who listened as I told her things I didn’t know how to tell anyone else.

My fourth-grade teacher Mrs. H., who sent us off carrying glass jars into the field behind our school one afternoon to see how many insects we could find in an hour, then wondered with us about how many insects must live in the world.

At night, before bed, I search them online.

Mr. M., my first-grade teacher, let us take turns standing on his shoes as he held our hands and walked us up the sidewalk during recess. He taught us arias and songs in foreign languages while he accompanied us on the piano, which he played in grand and sweeping gestures. From his obituary, I learned that before he had been a teacher, he had sung opera in New York and Europe, in the chorus, onstage with people like Maria Callas and Plácido Domingo.

Professor L., who inspired me to major in French, spent one week of her course teaching us about cheese and wine bottle labels, then invited us to have class at her house, where we tasted everything and listened to Jacques Brel records.

My heart is wild these days. It wanders off in all directions. I am out of my mind.

Some people I only remember in flashes, like old Mrs. S., who on Sundays led us in a line around the preschool room as we each held the waist of the child in front of us and sang about buying the world a house and furnishing it with apple trees and honeybees.

My mentors are piling up in my memory like tree ferns did in ancient prehistoric forests, dying faster than they can decay.

I even remember children I babysat, whom I once would have thought had nothing to teach me, but they all did: D. is a pediatrician. B. was on his way to becoming a musician like his father, but died in an auto wreck. H. (his mother tells me) is successfully managing schizophrenia.

In my search for the people of my past, I sometimes find only an obituary, but sometimes I find an address, and I write to them. Often they write back. Usually we don’t correspond again, but I always feel relieved that I caught them.

UNTIL RECENTLY, THIS FERN room held dozens more ferns and fern allies, but a mosaic virus tore through the conservatory and killed nearly a third of its collection. I feel certain the remaining ferns are unperturbed, that the virus does not merit one ferny shrug. Mass death happens in nature all the time.

ABOUT THAT AFTERNOON THAT MRS. H. let us catch insects in the field behind the school—she called the group of us back together at one point: a boy had found a praying mantis. All I could see were grass and leaves, but then his spiny legs and the rest of his green body resolved, and after that I could not imagine how I missed it.

At the end of the day, we unscrewed the jar lids and let the insects go into a world that suddenly looked both more knowable and less probable.

5.

WALT WHITMAN WRITES IN an early edition of Leaves of Grass: “There was a child went forth every day, / And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became.”

6.

THREE HUNDRED MILLION YEARS AGO, Earth was still learning how to be the place we now know. Its early plants learned how to live on the land, in fern-thick forests that grow in swamps. The young trees had developed root systems, but these roots were still figuring out how to be roots, and they were too shallow to anchor trees very well. The trees fell over all the time.

But the world did not yet know what to do with all the trees afterward, either. They piled up in the stagnant water and never broke down.

The pile continued to grow: strap-shaped leaves, tree ferns, giant horsetails, and club mosses all mounded into an ungainly prehistoric mess. Century upon century upon century, the plants pressed on each other, on the ground. At some point, the world covered it all with glacier ice two miles thick, and the plants first turned into peat, then veins of coal that held eons’ worth of sunlight, capable of creating fire. And so the past is compressed under the weight of its own memories.

I LOOK UP FROM MY THOUGHTS one moment too late: the girl-child has wriggled away from me again. I’m perfectly rude, cutting through small clusters of people as I try to catch her, and they smile and let me do it. I internally debate the social acceptability of attaching a bicycle flag to her torso.

Now that she is unfurling, growing, I revel in all of her, both sparkles and shadows. She also makes me newly aware that I am going to die. It does not feel as morbid as it sounds. In the hours I labored giving birth to her, I accepted that her coming might force me to be shed from her life and everything I knew. The feeling has never left me.

I don’t mind, either: not as long as she is able to live and be cared for. I am no longer afraid to die. I am fuel.

7.

A CONSERVATORY IS NOT A GARDEN. 

Conservatories and gardens suggest the natural world, though, being curated, they are not exactly that. Conservatories are more artificial than gardens, because their plants are protected from weather. Wind does not exist, warmth is consistent, and rain is precisely measured from soak hoses and misters in the ceiling.

To the tribes of Abraham—Christians, Muslims, Jews—gardens are Paradise, whether one we hope to find ourselves in after we die (Islam) or an original, unspoiled place to which we can never return (Judeo-Christianity). These gardens are places to dwell in beauty and eat in abundance, without having to perform any labor. And, though this part is less often said, to have a mythic garden, one needs an unearthly gardener.

Our vision of Paradise is one of being exquisitely cared for. That is the collective dream of billions of people.

A garden is a dream.

8.

THE FERN IS THE FIRST FAMILY OF PLANTS to have a vascular system, and one of the first plants to live on land. Ferns have survived for a third of a billion years with little change: they’re living fossils. I love imagining them marching out of the surf, like the brooms carrying buckets of water in the Mickey Mouse version of The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, more and more of the lacy fronds charging onto the beach and plunging roots into the soil, the landscape changing and greening. Ferns in their infinite variety and scentless-ness and sizes and shapes of leaves coming into being in a world that was silent of not just highway noise but even buzzes and birdcalls, a world sounding only of wind, surf, and rain. Except that this march would have been invisible to human eyes, even if we had been there to see it, and it took millions of years.

Because ferns are one of the oldest forms of life on Earth, so old that they don’t know how to flower, the way they reproduce themselves—in a multistep dance, alternating generations—was, for the longest time, a mystery.

First the plant produces spores on the underside of its fronds, which are carried aloft on the wind or float on a current, to a place where they can germinate—soil, yes, but sometimes a less likely seeming place like a log or a rock. Then, the spores produce gametophytes, tiny plants shaped like hearts, which contain the sperm and egg cells needed to grow baby fern plants, which produce their own spores, and the cycle starts over.

IT’S HARD TO KNOW RIGHT AWAY what a mentor has gifted you. Sometimes it takes years to figure it out.

Ferns are the ultimate mentors.

9.

ONE OF MY FAVORITE ASPECTS of parenting is the way I get to revisit childhood from a different angle. I spend more time on the floor now than I have in years. When I was five, I knew what the undersides of all my parents’ tables looked like; now, after years of demurely sitting on my sofa, I am on the floor again, learning what the undersides of my own tables look like. I am again constructing block towers and blanket forts. I am reconsidering the emotions of frustration and delight.

The spiral is one of the oldest sacred geometric shapes. It’s a shape that people have always recognized and honored as a symbol of renewal, and it has been found carved into stone by ancient peoples on every single continent except Antarctica.

Of spirals, Carl Jung says, “You always come over the same point where you have been before, but never really the same, it is above or below, inside, outside, so it means growth.”

For nature, the spiral’s shape is just an optimal way to use energy and space, and the fiddlehead’s spiral is one of many similarly shaped objects in nature. You can see the same mathematical pattern play out in everything from spiderwebs and the path of draining water, to the flight pattern of the hawk and the arms of the Milky Way. Even the cochlea of the inner ear, which converts sound waves into electrical impulses that the brain can interpret as information, is yet another logarithmic spiral.

But the Milky Way and the inner ear? Why am I spending all this time dreaming about something I can’t see instead of noticing what is unspiraling in front of me? Which in this case is not a fern but a quicksilver girl-child. I jerk up my head, alarmed, but it turns out she’s only walked a few feet away before she stops to stare at a rare person her size.

The other toddler stares back. For what seems like a long time, they stand face-to-face, astonished.

I walk up behind my daughter, bend down, and kiss the top of her head, the whorl of hair at her crown.

10.

IT TURNS OUT THAT THE RISE in the use of words like mentor and caregiver accompanies the growing numbers of Western women entering the workplace as I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s.

Caregiver is first used in the title of a book published in the mid-1960s, shortly after President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Medicare Act, referring to people who work with those who have mental illness, are elderly, or are sick. In the 1990s, the meaning of the word expands (along with the number of child care centers in the U.S.) to those who care for children. Mentor is far older, from Greek mythology, but we start to use it more when women enter the field of business en masse and seek out other women to help them establish themselves. Mentors are informal and unpaid teachers.

I use these terms because they are what I have. They did not exist when I was a child meeting teachers and other adults who mattered to me and are dying now. Then, such people were called grown-ups, role models at best. They were less often hired to care or help; they simply were. My generation of latchkey kids is famously said to have lacked mentors and caregivers as we learned to navigate the world. Yet my world was full of adults who cared for me, and I needed them. At various times, a teacher or a neighbor or a babysitter said something, or showed me how to do something, and it was as if a key floated toward me through the air, fitting into a lock I had not known existed until that moment. Those adults also tended to listen, pay attention, and spend time with me in ways that went well beyond their obligations.

The Czech writer Karel Čapek says something similar in a small book called The Gardener’s Year, when he asserts that cultivating a garden and the spirit are inseparable acts. “What holds true for the soil—that you must give it more than you take away—also holds true for nations, institutions, marriage, friendship, education, in short for human culture as a whole, which comes into being and maintains itself in time only as long as its cultivators overgive of themselves.” Those caregivers and mentors, beyond their daily ministrations, taught me how to trust myself and trust the world. And for the times when the world would prove dark and untrustworthy and I doubted my worth, they taught me how to survive. At the time, I just thought I was going to school or moving through the rhythms of my day, but their daily acts, years later, proved to have spiritual resonance.

ONE THING THAT NAGS ME ABOUT Čapek’s noble statement: what happens when a large group of people—in a nation, in an institution—decides to absolve themselves from the responsibility of giving care and leave that hard work for others? What if certain groups of people (who often need care themselves) are consistently asked to do more and more, unpaid or underpaid, and invisibly? Shouldn’t we all be cultivators? What if a culture fails to value the act of caring? What happens to the culture then?

MY DAUGHTER WILL NOT REMEMBER GRETCHEN. But when Gretchen leaves us and my daughter enters her Montessori preschool, the woman who runs the school will nod at our daughter wandering her new classroom and say, You can tell by the way she moves that she knows she’s loved, and I will know that my husband and I did not develop our daughter’s confidence in being cared for all on our own.

A gardener controls only space. The conservatory controls time.

11.

FERNS ARE THE ULTIMATE MENTORS. 

They have survived multiple mass extinctions. Sixty-six million years ago, when a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico, three in four of the world’s species perished, including the dinosaurs. But if you look just above the carnage in that particular fossil layer, ferns dominate the next layer up, a sign that the world was setting itself to rights.

They survived the evolution of flowering plants.

Ferns may have changed our planet’s climate. The modest yet mighty Azolla, also known as mosquito fern, fairy moss, and water velvet, is delicate-looking but hardy. It lives on the surface of the water, and it grows so fast it can double in size every week. Fifty million years ago, it grew unchecked in the area above the Arctic Circle, then sank to the bottom of a warm sea where it could not break down. Instead, it drew enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and nitrogen from the air—so much that it may have actually changed the climate of our planet from that of a hothouse to one with a sunny equator and frigid poles.

Ferns are patient. They have nothing but time.

Ferns may help us save ourselves. Chinese brake fern is capable of absorbing large quantities of arsenic from the soil without harming itself, so it’s often planted at toxic waste sites. If or when we can no longer survive as a species, I imagine the ferns here without us.

12.

THE GLASS WALLS OF A CONSERVATORY are both transparent and visible, marking a line between the dream world and the real, between wanting and having. The conservatory depends on the technology that can create such large panes of glass. The enormous walls of the conservatories of nineteenth-century Europe were created by human breath.

Each piece of glass began as a blown balloon. Then, the sweaty glassblower stood awkwardly on a platform near the furnace, swinging the glass balloon downward on his glassblowing pipe, and the hot, soft glass lengthened. The glass was heavy, but his arms were strong after years of such work.

After he had stretched the glass balloon into a long cylinder, he cut off its ends, made a long cut down its sides, and laid it in an oven until it softened again and flattened into a pane that was thinner, stronger, and larger than anyone knew how to make until then.

A gardener controls only space. The conservatory controls time.

The glass walls of the conservatory that my daughter and I walk through were made by machines in the twentieth century. But all the glass in the Palm House at Kew Gardens in London, which inspired the design of this conservatory, was handblown. I would like to visit Kew. I would like to walk with my daughter through such a bubble, among the ferns and cycads, sheltered from snow and wind by glass made from the breath of the dead.

Across the Northeastern United States, the curled shoots of the ostrich fern—also called fiddlehead greens—are considered an early spring delicacy.

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