‘Resurrection plants’ bounce back after years of drought. Do they hold lessons for crops?

Cape Town, South Africa—On a hillside 20 minutes from central Cape Town sits a colossal monument to Cecil Rhodes, the late–19th century mining magnate, prime minister of the British Cape Colony, and founder of the territory of Rhodesia, in what is now Zimbabwe and Zambia. Resembling a Greek temple, the tribute to British imperialism has fallen out of favor in postapartheid South Africa, and Rhodes’s statue has been vandalized several times. But its terraces offer expansive views of the University of Cape Town (UCT)—whose main campus sits on land donated by Rhodes—and the Cape Flats, a densely populated area southeast of the city center. That panorama wasn’t why Jill Farrant parked her red Mini Cooper next to the monument on a glorious morning in December 2025. Farrant, 65, had come looking for a plant. With three colleagues and a Science reporter in tow, she started to descend a sandy trail, roughly in the direction of her own lab building, a couple hundred meters below. “I’m not sure we’ll find it,” she cautioned, her eyes fixed on the shrubby vegetation along the trail. The area was devastated by wildfire in 2021 and was fenced off for restoration. Suddenly, she bent and picked up a few brownish, brittle sprigs that looked bone-dry and, well, very dead. “It’s still here!” Farrant exclaimed, holding out her find to the group. It was Anemia affrorum, a fern whose miraculous powers Farrant wanted to demonstrate. After driving back to her lab, she carefully put a few of the sprigs in a plastic petri dish filled with water. “Now, we have to wait,” she said. Within hours, tiny green leaves began to unfurl. By the next morning, the sprigs looked lush, sporting neat rows of green leaves, like a miniature Christmas tree. A. affrorum is a “resurrection plant” that can withstand months or even years of extreme drought, then roar back to life within 1 or 2 days when watered—a rare evolutionary adaptation to climates with long or unexpected dry spells. For 3 decades Farrant has studied the extreme physiological makeover such plants undergo as they lose water, often breaking down the chlorophyll pigments that power their cells and replacing nearly every trace of moisture with sugars and proteins. “Drying out without dying,” Farrant calls it. She thinks some of the same tricks could help make major crops such as maize, wheat, or rice more drought tolerant. “Resurrection plants can show us how to do it,” she says. And she was eager to show that “desiccation tolerance,” as scientists call the survival mechanism, occurs right on her doorstep. That evangelism is vintage Farrant, says Rose Marks, a plant scientist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who became captivated by a TED Talk Farrant gave in 2015, did a postdoc with her, and is still a close collaborator. “Jill is very charismatic,” Marks says. “She’s one of the main reasons I ended up in this field.” Other scientists agree. “Resurrection plants were pretty obscure to plant scientists and to biology for a long time,” says Robert VanBuren, a plant biologist at Michigan State University whose lab has collaborated with Farrant the past 5 years. “Jill was one of the real pioneers that brought these plants to the mainstream. She did all these really seminal studies.” Baekal Girma, a Ph.D. student who splits his time between Farrant’s lab and the Ethiopian Institute of Agricultural Research in his native country, says she is also an inspiring and energetic mentor who has trained young scientists from around the African continent. Farrant first encountered a resurrection plant at age 9, growing up in Limpopo province, in northeastern South Africa, where her father was a tobacco farmer. In a dry riverbed close to the farm where she’d go when she felt sad, she noticed how a seemingly dead plant had turned green overnight. Her father dismissed the story. “My dad was: ‘Love you, darling, but you’ve got an active imagination, OK?’” she recalls. She did write about it in her diary, however. Farrant studied biology in Durban at what today is the University of KwaZulu-Natal and did a Ph.D. on “recalcitrant” seeds such as those of coffee, cacao, and mango, which, unlike most seeds, can’t withstand drought. She spent a year as a postdoc at a U.S. Department of Agriculture lab in Fort Collins, Colorado, then took her current job at UCT in 1993, just as South Africa’s apartheid system—which she says she hated—was being dismantled. Unpacking boxes in her new home near Cape Town, Farrant opened her childhood diary and read her notes about the strange plant. Around the same time she came across a paper by Australian botanist Donald Gaff about resurrection plants in southern Africa, published in Science in 1971—not long after she had made her own observations in Limpopo. Farrant took it as a sign. She had found a research topic for the rest of her career. There are about 1300 species of resurrection plants, including mosses, ferns, and about 300 angiosperms, or flowering plants. Most live in dry, rocky places with poor soils. They occur on every continent except Antarctica, but southern Africa is the global hot spot. Most plant species get in trouble or die if their water content drops below 60%. Some specialists, such as succulents, can go as low as 50% or 40%, aided by features such as fleshy, water-retaining leaves sealed with a waxy coating. Because water evaporates through stomata—the microscopic pores through which plants acquire carbon dioxide for photosynthesis—some drought-tolerant plants open them only at night, storing up CO2 for the day. “Those plants do everything to keep water in,” Farrant says. Resurrection plants do the opposite: Once they have gone below a certain water content, they get rid of their remaining moisture, driving it as low as 5% and shriveling to a wispy brown remnant. Although they occur in 13 lineages across the plant kingdom, resurrection species have all evolved a similar strategy to survive as they dry out—a complex, tightly choreographed transformation that Farrant has helped describe. Water inside cells is replaced by sugars, including sucrose and raffinose, and proteins, forming a glasslike substance that prevents cell membranes from collapsing. “Chaperone” proteins help preserve the structure of essential macromolecules such as DNA and RNA. As a cell’s volume shrinks, its outer wall, made of cellulose, folds in so it can stay in contact with the cell membrane sitting inside. A host of antioxidants mop up so-called reactive oxygen species, which form in response to stress and can damage DNA, proteins, and membranes. Photosynthesis, one particularly powerful source of these dangerous molecules, comes to an end. Some resurrection plants curl their leaves to prevent sunlight from reaching their chlorophyll; others break down the photosynthetic machinery altogether and rebuild it later. In the final stages, as its water content drops below 20%, the plant produces a host of RNAs and other molecules it will store to fuel its eventual resurrection, Farrant says. Then everything comes to a standstill. Farrant and others hope some of these mechanisms can be bestowed on common crops to improve food security as climate change reduces rainfall or makes it erratic. Projections suggest sub-Saharan Africa—where 95% of all agriculture is rainfed—could lose 20% or more of its arable land by 2050, for example, even as its population doubles to 2 billion. Yet the crops that feed humanity, selected primarily for yield, have become less drought tolerant; even a few weeks of drought can ruin a harvest. Crop breeders have developed varieties that can store more water, lose less to evaporation, or grow deeper roots to tap moisture, enabling them to survive dry spells. But crops inspired by resurrection plants might shrug off deeper droughts. Many crops, for example, respond to drought by letting their leaves shrivel, a phenomenon called senescence. They use their remaining energy to flower and produce seeds, giving the plant a shot at propagating before it dies. “Once that happens, that’s it, your crop is lost,” Farrant says. Resurrection plants avoid senescence, and Farrant’s team has worked out the molecular mechanisms that block it in two species, one a model for maize and the other a relative of teff, a crop widely grown in Ethiopia. The next step, she says, is to try to introduce the senescence-prevention mechanism into crops, most likely through genetic engineering. Another idea for making crops more resilient is to introduce or activate genes that produce the masses of antioxidants that help resurrection plants survive dry spells. Most crops already have the genes they need to mimic resurrection plants, Farrant says. Those genes are at work in their seeds, which can survive for years or decades and germinate at the right time and place. Resurrection plants likely evolved by expanding the expression of those genes, Marks says. “They took parts of the mechanism in seeds, adding a few extra bells and whistles and regulatory components so it could be expressed in vegetative tissues” such as roots, stems, and leaves. Finding the master genes that switch on these genes could be the key to endowing crops with drought resistance, Farrant says. Triggering the switches in crops may not be easy, however. In 2017, Farrant and Henk Hilhorst, a seed biologist retired from the Wageningen Agricultural University, published a paper in Nature Plants about the genome of Xerophyta viscosa, a resurrection plant native to South Africa. (It’s now called X. schlecteri.) The study provided “strong support” for the theory that these species relied on genes normally active in seeds, says Hilhorst, now an honorary researcher in Farrant’s lab. “But in retrospect, it was a very descriptive paper,” he adds. “We weren’t able to wrangle the mechanisms out of the genome.” Hilhorst thinks desiccation-tolerant crops are still some time off, in part because the field is small, and grants are hard to come by. Farrant says she has tried the Gates Foundation and other potential funders, but they want to see more evidence that the strategy can work. Other findings that could help crops seem closer to application. Farrant’s team is studying the microbiome that colonizes the roots of resurrection plants. Such communities of microbes promote root growth and nutrient uptake, and they could be applied to crops as a desiccation-resistant “biostimulant,” Farrant says. “Not only would you have a fabulous crop with no fertilizer, but you are likely to resist a long drought and still get a high yield.” Canadian entrepreneur Dara Gallinger has founded a company, Mother Wild, to bring products developed in Farrant’s lab to market. “We really believe in her work,” Gallinger says. One resurrection plant has already had commercial impact—although not quite the way Farrant hoped. It’s her favorite species, Myrothamnus flabellifolia, which occurs throughout central and southern Africa, including in Limpopo. The only woody resurrection plant, with red flowers and tiny, fan-shaped leaves, the species has played an important role in traditional African medicine for centuries. Its leaves are turned into lotions to treat wounds, smoked to treat asthma and respiratory infections, or used for a medicinal tea. Farrant has long championed the healing qualities of Myro, as she affectionately calls it, and in 2012, fashion designer Giorgio Armani hired her as a scientific consultant for the creation of a skin care line called Crema Nera, based on the plant. Farrant traveled to Pantelleria, a rugged Mediterranean island where Armani had a vacation home, to shoot a promotional video with Australian actress Cate Blanchett. (It’s called “an intimate conversation” between the two but Blanchett does 90% of the talking.) But as more companies jumped on the Myrothamnus bandwagon—demand has surged in China, Farrant says—she has become increasingly concerned about overharvesting of the slow-growing wild plant. In 2019, she suggested Armani help launch a project to turn it into a new cash crop. “They wouldn’t even entertain the idea,” she says—so she decided to try it herself. Now, Ali Kiyaei, a Ph.D. student with experience in biotech commercialization, is leading a Save the Myro project that aims to cultivate the plant and share the benefits with communities that have long used it. “If we can find ways to propagate it, we can give it to farmers who have really shitty soil, and they can make a big profit,” Farrant says. “I want to give back to the people in Limpopo. That could be my legacy.” In 2013, Farrant spoke at Falling Walls, an annual science gathering in Berlin. Ever the public relations manager for her field, she gave every member of the audience a small test tube with a Myrothamnus sprig, allowing them to observe its revival at home. She also loves showing high-speed videos of plants coming back to life, set to the Toto song Africa or I Like the Way by BodyRockers. They sometimes get her a standing ovation, she says. She takes mentoring as seriously as her plants. Farrant has used her own money to support students with financial difficulties and helped them with personal problems, for example. “She has changed many people’s lives,” says Hawwa Gabier, a postdoc at the lab. “Her big motto is about upliftment and bringing people’s inner strength to light,” says Llewelyn Van Der Pas, who leads the biostimulant project. She does so in part by being open about her own life. In the first 10 minutes of her interview with Science—during the drive to the Rhodes Memorial—Farrant shared that she was “born a genetic alcoholic” who once drank uncontrollably but has been sober for 30 years now. She doesn’t care who knows and hopes sharing her story might help others. She identifies as gay, which “naturally creates a safe space for other LGBTQ persons,” Van Der Pas says. In August 2025, Farrant was given a Lifetime Achievement Award by South Africa’s National Research Foundation, one of the country’s highest honors. She was originally set to retire this year, and was already beginning to wind down her work, but after an independent panel gave her lab the highest possible marks, the university asked her to stay on for another 5 years. She accepted the offer and hopes to bring in new students. “I’m a workaholic, and this is my passion,” she says. She also hopes to see a few applications of her work become reality. “Then I will pass it on to the next generation.”