Yes, they are almost all some shade of green, and yes, they generally have a certain “ferniness”—soft texture, narrowly triangular, pinnately compound fronds coming from a clumped or creeping underground rhizome—but ferns are also beautiful, undeniably alluring, and truly a calming and unifying presence in the garden.

In many ways masses of ferns do for the shade garden what grasses do for the sun, harmonizing and uniting disparate colors and textures in a perfectly natural way. In fact, a shade garden without a good complement of ferns is simply incomplete.

~William Cullina–Native Ferns, Moss & Grasses

Eric Grissell–Insects and Gardens: In Pursuit of a Garden Ecology

We don’t have to—indeed, we neither can nor should—each provide all habitats, every sort of food. You plant nut treees and I’ll plant spruce, you keep a berry thicket and I’ll do the tall grass, or the bog, the woodlot, the crowds of fruiting shrubs and beds of wildflowers. But let us weave them together into something big enough to matter by connecting each patch with others at the corners and along the boundaries. This is the rich, new landscape; this is the new kind of gardener who asks not whether he should plant this ornament or another but which patch is missing from his community, how he can provide it, and how animals will move from his patch to the next.

This is the ark.

Sara Stein—Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Own Back Yards

Michael Pollan–Why Mow? The Case Against Lawns, The New York Times Magazine, May 28, 1989

Eric Grissell–Insects and Gardens: In Pursuit of a Garden Ecology

Plants that bear fruit in the summer generally dole their berries out as though by prior agreement, sharing the planting season so that each gets its turn and customers are fed from June through August. Each speaks to the locals who have time to learn where and when to find it. Raspberries, like strawberries, waft a fragrance. Blueberries and serviceberries speak in three colors. Green fruits are toxic and not yet nourishing. A rosy blush signals impending ripeness (resident animals monitor blushing berries like children watch cookies browning in the oven). The blue ones say “Eat me” very clearly. We don’t have to attend to these details. It’s like buying groceries once and watching meals prepare themselves for years.

Sara Stein–Noah’s Garden: Restoring the Ecology of Our Back Yards

In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden—a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants.

Diane Ackerman–The Rarest of the Rare: Vanishing Animals, Timeless Worlds

I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren’t important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules.

Elizabeth Marshall Thomas–The Hidden Life of Deer: Lessons from the Natural World

To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another.

Leonardo da Vinci

Rachel Carson–Silent Spring