Scholar Solvejg Nitzke discusses her book The Elegance of Ferns Portrait of a Botanical Marvel (Greystone Books, 2026). We discuss the enchantment of ferns spanning centuries - from fern inspired folklore, to the Victorian fern craze Pteridomania, to the ways that science has sought to understand and classify them. We honour this ancient life and consider the existential nature of contemplating deep time through plants and the power of gifting our attention to earth’s peculiar life forms.
Bio:
Solvejg Nitzke is a literary and cultural studies scholar at The University of Vienna. Her research explores precarious nature in nineteenth-century popular literature and culture, as well as climate and environmental catastrophe across ecological storytelling, science fiction, and conspiracy narratives. Nitzke is the author of The Elegance of Ferns Portrait of a Botanical Marvel (Greystone Books, 2026) and Making Kin with Trees: A Cultural Poetics of Interspecies Care. She lives in Austria.
Plant Kingdom is hosted and produced by Catherine Polcz with Music by Carl Didur.