Fronds of Knowledge and Decolonial Fern Relations in the Sikkim Himalayas

This essay on decolonizing fern knowledge is the twelfth installment of the Botanical Imaginations series, which complicates, diversifies, and proliferates the stories we tell about plants. Series editors: Laleh Ahmad, Tessa Archambault, Dylan Couch, Ellie Kincaid, Rebecca Laurent, Kayleigh Lobdell, Clare Michaud, Nicolás Felipe Rueda Rey

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When I visited Kew Gardens in the autumn of 2025, I found myself surrounded by ferns—filling the glass greenhouse, spilling into the pathways winding through the manicured garden, and placed in pots at the cafeteria. They were large and small, and all shades of green. I was reminded of my village in the Sikkim Himalayas, where ferns grow in abundance on the side of the road and in forests around the village.

Ferns are known as kem in my language, Lhokyed. My relationship to ferns has developed over a lifetime of engaging with place and its plants, and is informed by Indigenous knowledge.

In Sikkim, ferns are part of our everyday life: They are ingredients for food and drink and used for shelter and creative pursuit by humans and other co-residents of Sikkim’s powerful landscape, including nonhuman animals, deities, and spirits. The very structure of ferns vividly illustrates these multiplicities. A single rachis, or stem down the middle of the plant, sprouts many fronds that stretch outwards. There are many different parts to a fern, and there are many ways to know and care for ferns across Indigenous and colonial epistemologies.

Ferns are not just aesthetically beautiful pot plants but agents of the land, interacting with humans and nonhumans around them, providing nourishment for the mind and stomach.

Understanding ferns as agents decolonizes our relationships with them by encouraging deeper, more thoughtful engagements with the more-than-human world. Considering ferns as agents situates us within sacred, powerful environments, where people are not at the center but live together with plants, rocks, water, and other elements. Appreciating ways that we live together provides insights into local histories, languages, and botanies. It also decentralizes colonial forms of extraction, allowing ferns to flourish.

Fern Fronds as Different Fern Knowledges

In Sikkim, ferns can vividly illustrate the diversity of our communities. The different languages, ethnicities, and cosmologies that comprise the land of Sikkim are like many fronds on one rachis.

I have learned to know ferns, think about them, and relate to them through experiences and education. This includes Indigenous knowledge from the Lhopo community, knowledge shared by my neighbors, the Rong people, who are the first Indigenous community of Sikkim, and from Buddhist cosmologies. In these knowledge systems, ferns are co-residents in the land, growing in abundance in forests and gardens, eaten to provide nourishment, and offered and utilized in religious ritual, where they act as intermediaries between human and spirit worlds.

In Sikkim, there are also many other ways to know ferns; they are grown in different locations, eaten with different forms of preparation, and thought about differently by Sikkim’s many cultures.

These ways of knowing ferns are very different from how ferns live and are imagined at the Kew Gardens. At the Kew Gardens, ferns are meticulously presented as part of a broader aesthetic of empire.

The Ferns of Empire

Sikkim became connected to the British empire in the long nineteenth century when Britain sought to extend their economic foothold in the Himalayas in order to secure new markets in Tibet. The rich biodiversity of Sikkim was a central part of British engagement with the Kingdom. Leading British botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817-1911) became famous for his collecting expedition to Sikkim in the late 1840s. He was enamored with the wide array of trees, flowers, and nonhuman animals he encountered and collected over 3,000 species from Sikkim and Bengal. His visit to Sikkim led to disputes with the Government of Sikkim and undermined Sikkim’s sovereignty.

Hooker, notably, was the son of William Jackson Hooker, the first Director at Kew.

Kew’s collections of flora and fauna were integral to the development of British botanical imperialism. Scientific endeavors were intimately connected to economic interest as imperial representatives sought to find new products for the market, as well as new buyers. This imperial view of plants as commodities contrasts with the way communities in Sikkim understood them to be co-residents. British botanists relied heavily on local knowledge keepers but often never acknowledged who they were. Through a process of exploitation, imperialists removed plants, flowers, seeds, and other members of landscapes in order to transplant them to Kew (and later to other parts of the empire), sometimes making money in the process that never went back to their communities of origin.

When I visit Kew, I think about how, before ferns were houseplants to aesthetically appreciate, Hooker and his predecessors engaged with ferns as scientific specimens to collect. Environmental humanities scholar Matthew Beach has traced this change over time: how ferns evolved from a collectible for European scientists to a popular houseplant around the world. He also goes on to write, “Because of their reproduction by spores rather than seeds, [ferns] often had connotations of magic and mystique” and were used in rituals. They were used in the production of both magic and medicine. These histories demonstrate the multilayered engagements that Europeans had with ferns that predate their contemporary association with aesthetic beauty.

Ferns embody diverse meanings and uses around the world, taking on different cultural, medicinal, and ecological roles from Asia to the Pacific and Europe. Rarámuri scholar Enrique Salmón, for example, discusses the importance of fiddlehead ferns for North American Native diets and for basket-weaving traditions. Anishanaabe scholar Wendy Makoons Geniusz similarly brings to light the many ways Anishinaabe communities engage with ferns, including for packaging and wrapping, as well as for food. Ferns were also an important part of Māori diets in Aotearoa, and are celebrated in contemporary movements for kai (or food) sovereignty.

When they were transferred to imperial metropoles in Britain, ferns became prized for their aesthetic qualities. Valuing ferns only for their aesthetic beauty is like seeing the fern only as its rhizome and not for its many other parts. The significance of different forms of knowledge held and generated by ferns in Sikkim and in other communities around the world is vital for appreciating the different forms of wellbeing they facilitate as co-agents in our global forests.

Wellbeing and Reciprocity in Sikkim

In my village, ferns are everywhere, from kitchen gardens to forests. They grow in abundance, and in Buddhist communities in Sikkim, they are appreciated as an example of how our landscape is a place of abundance. This concept is invoked by two of the traditional Indigenous names for Sikkim: in Rong language, Mayel Lyang, meaning “the land of eternal paradise,” and in Lhokyed, Denjong, or the “Hidden Valley of Rice.”

The widespread availability of different types of ferns and their ability to grow abundantly despite the challenges to soil and water brought by climate change makes them crucial for the continued survival of humans in Sikkim, as well as animals and more-than-human deities and spirits. The many ways people relate to ferns also demonstrate their significance as teachers, transmitting modes of decolonial knowledge and wellbeing that transcend simplistic understandings of ferns.

One of these modes of knowledge emerges from the nutritional value of fern rhizomes, which are grown in kitchen gardens—or more commonly foraged from forests. As children, our parents warned us never to gather too many, and to always leave enough behind so they will continue to grow and be available for everyone. Fern rhizomes grow so widely that even wandering cows and goats cannot eat all of them.

To this day, I collect these while walking through the forest on the way home from visiting relatives. Kertse, as these edible ferns species are known, are prepared in multiple ways—steamed with water, fried with butter, and sometimes served with homemade cheese and chili.

The abundance of ferns resist commodification and promote wellbeing in their most basic presence in the land. But for relations to ferns to continue, they need care and not over-harvesting. Prioritizing care for fern beings decenters human desires and emphasizes reciprocity.

Learning Patience from Ferns

Thikshing are another type of fern that are used to create a delicious delicacy: chang, or homemade, fermented alcohol. The spiciness of their fronds makes them ideal for flavoring dishes, fermenting drinks, and also to wrap pao, or homemade yeast made from fronds.

At home, we make chang using a variety of different native grains, including maize, millet, buckwheat, wheat, corn, roots, or a mixture of the above. We use bamboo-woven baskets, known in Lhokyed as changtse, that are lined with banana leaves and fern fronds, and we pack the grains inside. We then leave the grains to ferment for at least two to four weeks, though the longer the better. Sometimes people will leave the chang to ferment for five to six months, and then distill the liquid to make arak, a potent spirit drink.

Chang making takes patience. It is not a skill that can be learned in a rush; it’s a form of ancestral knowledge gained through experience.

In our present-day context in Sikkim, different types of imported foods contain processed ingredients, and chemicals are promoted as modern, tasty, and desirable. However, ferns remain everywhere, freely available and accessible, acting as vivid exemplars of food sovereignty and environmental justice for their capacity to feed and nourish in an affordable, accessible way.

Species Entanglements and Multispecies Care

Besides food, ferns have associations with other forms of abundance. Large ferns are used in Sikkim to make beds for cows, especially as they prepare to deliver their calves. Cows are beloved in Buddhist communities in Sikkim due to the association of milk with wealth and wellbeing. When necessary, shepherds caring for cows or gathering food and firewood in the forest may also make fern houses to shelter in to escape monsoon rainfall. I have many memories of taking shelter inside fern huts as the rain poured down through the canopy above.

Another crucial type of fern is chakem, the iron fern that is so strong it is used to weave baskets and make pens. Chakem are associated with the bodhisattva Manjusri because of their association with writing and basket weaving, both important forms of knowledge. When I was a child, I would copy Buddhist manuscripts and do my homework using pens made from carved chakem or bamboo, depending what was available, on my way home from school.

However, I would have to be careful when gathering chakem, because these ferns would grow in large bushes that were also associated with other nonhuman kin: bears. In the cold winter, bears would occasionally venture into villages seeking food, and would take shelter in these large ferns where they could sleep for days, completely unseen. For this reason, we were always warned to keep an eye out for aku, or “uncles”—our name for bears, a word that demonstrates our respect for them as co-residents in our sacred landscape of abundance.

Our kin expands beyond the human, and this kinship encourages us to be thoughtful in our daily interactions with plants, flowers, and other elements. This is not romanticism for an Indigenous lifeway; it is pragmatism, borne from experience and an awareness of the importance of care for our multispecies neighbors in order to ensure that abundance can continue, even in the face of extractive environmental policies.

Sharing Abundance

Not only do humans and nonhuman animals enjoy these foods and forms of shelter, but we also offer them in rituals to the deities and spirits of our land and water, and we use them to wrap gifts and to write ritual and prayer texts. In Buddhist cosmologies, we refer to these beings as chokyong yullha zhidak, “protectors of our land.” These offerings are enactments of reciprocity between the land and human residents. We do not overharvest or over-gather ferns, but instead, will leave them and take them only as needed.

These forms of reciprocity that incorporate every part of ferns contrast with the appreciation of ferns purely for how they look in herbariums and botanical gardens. Instead, in Sikkim, we see relationships that connect to magical histories of ferns found in cultures around the world. In the valleys of the Sikkim Himalayas, on the lap of the mountains, we understand ferns to be offerings from the land to us that we return by preparing food, drink, and shelter for many of the beings resident in Sikkim—beings that we have relationships with.

Their rhizomes, fronds, and spores all contain interdimensional knowledge and decolonial botanical imaginations that can travel like spores around the world and across time and space to bring about interdimensional and interspecies wellbeing. Decolonizing ferns disrupts conceptions of the plant as passive recipients of botanical imaginings and acknowledges their agency and role in making relationships across species.

Beyond aesthetic and imperial showpieces at Kew, ferns are agents in the making of relationships across species.

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Featured image: Ferns grow abundantly in Sikkim, and in Buddhist communities they help symbolize a landscape of plenty. Photo by the author, 2024.

Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is a scholar from the Lhopo community in western Sikkim who studies human relationships with more-than-human environments in western Sikkim through engaging with Indigenous and Buddhist cosmovisions. His articles have explored different ways of knowing Sikkim’s powerful mountains, lands, and waters, including propitiation of the land, smoke offerings, trees, birds, and chiles, and through knowledge return and repair. Contact.