The dirt on air ferns, and how harvesting the unusual "plant" is reducing plastic pollution

The word of the day is "quirky": Quirky "plants," quirky movies and a quirky garden

When is a plant actually an animal? Meet the air fern. (Thames Products)

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Hi, guys!

I recently wrote about low-light houseplants that thrive in windowless office settings, and doing so reminded me of a quirky curiosity I encountered years ago called air fern.

Air ferns are marketed as no-maintenance houseplants that don’t require sunlight or water. Sound too good to be true? It is. Air ferns aren’t actually plants at all. They’re not even alive. They are the dyed remains of hydrozoan marine animals in the coral family native to the United Kingdom.

To get to the root of this perplexing oddity, I connected with James Elbra, a third-generation air fern harvester at the family-run Thames Products, which is based in Southend on Sea in Essex, UK.

My first question — which might also be occurring to you at this point — was: Who had the brainstorm to come up with such an idea?