Although I was born in Portland, I grew up in the suburbs, and didn’t get to live in the city proper until after college. One day I saw a lovely, lacy fern and bought it for my little studio apartment, and the thing flourished even though I managed to kill other houseplants. It came with me to San Francisco and I installed a hook in our apartment building’s ceiling so it could hang in front of a nice bright window on Fillmore Street. For some reason I thought it was a Boston fern, and so when we moved out to Boston it seemed fitting that it was one of the only plants I would try to take with me. But on the drive out there one morning in Arizona we got in the car and the water bottles we’d left there overnight were frozen solid. That, combined with the attentions of two rowdy cats, spelled doom for my little fern. It lost all of its tiny leaves and turned into a sad brown skeleton.
Ever since then I’ve had my eyes peeled for another lacy fern, and I even looked them up online and found out that they are actually called Asparagus ferns (Asparagus setaceus, technically). One day recently I stopped by the local plant shop Pistil, looking for something else entirely, and saw this little guy, and I knew I had to take it home. This weekend I knotted up some rope into a cute macrame holder (following these instructions), and hung my little fern in its new home in front of a sunny window. I promise not to take it on any road trips.