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cannot study ferns in the wild without some understanding of why they grow where they do, and their relationship to other plants and animals, their habitats. Carol, his wife, is not a professional botanist, but her own enthusiasm, and her many years with John, have made her almost as knowledgeable as he is.
    I first met John and Carol on a Saturday morning back in 1993. I lived in the Bronx quite near the New York Botanical Garden, and that particular Saturday, I was strolling around the gardens with my friend Andrew. We happened into the old museum building, and Andrew, who had heard me rhapsodize about ferns more than once, spotted a notice referring to a meeting that day of the American Fern Society. I was curious—I had never heard of it—so we wandered through the labyrinthine innards of the building and eventually found the meeting, a gathering of about three dozen people in an upstairs room. This gathering had a strangely old-fashioned, Victorian quality about it. It could have been a meeting of an amateur botanical society in the 1850s or 1870s. John Mickel, I later learned, was one of the very few professional botanists in the group.
    Andrew whispered to me, “These are your sort of people,” and, as usual, he was right. They were indeed my sort of people—and they seemed to recognize me, welcome me, as one of themselves, as a fern person.
    It was a curious, motley crowd. In general it was an older group, with many retired people, but there were several people in their twenties too, some of whom worked in the conservatoryor the horticultural parts of the garden. Some were professionals—physicians or teachers; several were housewives; one was a bus driver. Some were city dwellers, with window boxes in their apartments; others had large gardens or even greenhouses in the country. Fern passion, it was clear, respected none of the usual categories, could take hold of anyone, at any age, and claim part of their lives. Some, I would find, had driven sixty or seventy-five miles to be there.
    I often have to go to professional meetings, meetings of neurologists or neuroscientists. But the feeling of this meeting was utterly different: There was a freedom, an ease and lack of competitiveness I had never seen in a professional meeting. Perhaps because of this ease and friendliness, the botanical passion and enthusiasm that everyone shared, perhaps because I felt no professional obligation resting on me, I began going to these meetings regularly, every month. Prior to this I had not belonged, with any conviction, to any group or society; now I eagerly looked forward to the first Saturday of each month; I had to be out of the country, or very sick, to miss the monthly AFS meeting.

    The New York chapter was established by John Mickel in 1973, but the American Fern Society itself goes back to the 1890s, when it was founded by four amateur botanists, who stayed in touch by full and frequent letters. These letters were published by one of them as the
Linnaean Fern Bulletin
, and this soon attracted interest among fern lovers all over the country.
    Amateurs, then, started the American Fern Society, just as they had founded the Torrey Botanical Society—a more general botanical society under the aegis of the famous botanist John Torrey—a few years earlier; and as they had started the British Pteridological Society in the 1890s. Most of the AFS’s membership, a century later, is still made up of amateurs, with just a sprinkling of professionals. But such amateurs! There is old Tom Morgan, whom I saw at my first meeting in 1993, and whom I have seen at virtually every meeting since. Tom, who has a long white beard, and looks more than a little like Darwin, is enormously knowledgeable and indefatigable, despite having had Parkinson’s disease for some years, and, recently, a broken hip. None of this daunts him: He climbs in the Adirondacks and the Rockies, treks through the rain forests of Hawaii and Costa Rica—always with