Rock fern, _Cheilanthes austrotenuifolia_ Donald Hobern/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA One afternoon in the late 1970s, my colleague and fellow student Helen Quirk handed me a brown, shrivelled fern frond. It appeared to be dead, and was so dry that when I crushed it between my fingers it disintegrated into a powder. Author Doctor of Botany, The University of Melbourne We placed another piece on a petrie dish and added water. Almost immediately, the piece began to unfold and, as though in time-lapse photography, it appeared to re-green. Within a few hours it looked like a normal, delicate fern. This was my first encounter with a resurrection fern: remarkable plants that look dead and dry, but when provided with the right conditions – often just the addition of water – rapidly spring back to life.