The Respiring Fern

What it looks like, and what it does

A basement hothouse of pale ferns under strip lights. Every frond curling and unfurling in a slow, measured rhythm. A brass nameplate for each bed. One fern, darker and larger than the rest, breathing against the others.

Mirrors breathing in the ward above. Slows ahead of failing breath. Occasionally takes up a rhythm of its own, and keeps it.

What is known

The ferns were planted for morale in 1961. Ten years later night porters noticed the fronds moving in time with breath and began recording the rate. Later the ferns slowed before patients did.

The hospital quietly used the garden as an early warning. In 2004 one fern grew and began breathing a slow pattern that matched no one. The patient in the corresponding bed, in a coma, began to breathe with it and stabilised for fifteen months. When the fern wilted in a dry summer the patient died the same hour. The hospital now waters it.

What it can do

• Mirrors the breathing of a patient in the ward above
• Lends its own rhythm to a failing breath

Where it stops

• Cannot sustain a patient beyond the life of its own fronds
• Wilts if the ward above is emptied

An encounter

Nwosu came down to check the humidifier and found the large fern breathing, slowly, against the rest. He stood by it for a while and found that his own chest had settled to its rhythm. The next morning he was told that the man in bed 14 had had the best night in a month. He said nothing about the fern, and watered it.

Emeka Nwosu, night porter, Basement garden, Alder Hill Hospital, A night in August

What is established, and what is only said

• established: Frond movement correlates with ward respiratory rates to within 0.4 breaths per minute across fifty years of porters' logs.
• incomplete: Three patients are recorded as having stabilised in time with an unmatched fern. All three outlived the fern by hours.
• rumor: That the porters take turns sitting with it.

Still unresolved

The fern chooses which patient to lend its rhythm to. It has never chosen the youngest, or the loudest. The staff have a theory about the pattern, which they will not write down.

Where it has been recorded

• Alder Hill (confirmed) — Recorded by Emeka Nwosu, night porter.

Stories about it

• Breathe With It (Entity story, 4 min) — In a hospital basement the ferns breathe in time with the ward above, and the night porter who waters them has begun to notice how the largest one chooses.

Connected entities

• Lung Moss — Both breathe for people. The Fern lends a rhythm and takes the patient with it. The Moss gives air and takes nothing.