Retro Garden

I’ll seek the shaggy fern-clad hill
And watch, ‘mid murmurs muttering stern,
The seed departing from the fern
Ere wakeful demons can convey
The wonder-working charm away.

Leyden.

“The green and graceful Fern” (filices) with its exquisite tracery must not be overlooked. It recalls many noble home-scenes to British eyes. Pliny says that “of ferns there are two kinds, and they bear neither flowers nor seed.” And this erroneous notion of the fern bearing no seed was common amongst the English even so late as the time of Addison who ridicules “a Doctor that had arrived at the knowledge of the green and red dragon, and had discovered the female fern-seed.” The seed is very minute and might easily escape a careless eye. In the present day every one knows that the seed of the fern lies on the under side of the leaves, and a single leaf will often bear some millions of seeds. Even those amongst the vulgar who believed the plant bore seed, had an idea that the seeds were visible only at certain mysterious seasons and to favored individuals who by carrying a quantity of it on their person, were able, like those who wore the helmet of Pluto or the ring of Gyges, to walk unseen amidst a crowd. The seed was supposed to be best seen at a certain hour of the night on which St. John the Baptist was born.

We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible,
Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Part I.

In Beaumont’s and Fletcher’s Fair Maid of the Inn, is the following allusion to the fern.
–Had you Gyges’ ring,
Or the herb that gives invisibility.

Ben Jonson makes a similar allusion to it:

I had
No medicine, sir, to go invisible,
No fern-seed in my pocket.

Pope puts a branch of spleen-wort, a species of fern, (Asplenium trichomanes) into the hand of a gnome as a protection from evil influences in the Cave of Spleen.

Safe passed the gnome through this fantastic band
A branch of healing spleen-wort in his hand.

The fern forms a splendid ornament for shadowy nooks and grottoes, or fragments of ruins, or heaps of stones, or the odd corners of a large garden or pleasure-ground.

I have had many delightful associations with this plant both at home and abroad. When I visited the beautiful Island of Penang, Sir William Norris, then the Recorder of the Island, and who was a most indefatigable collector of ferns, obligingly presented me with a specimen of every variety that he had discovered in the hills and vallies of that small paradise; and I suppose that in no part of the world could a finer collection of specimens of the fern be made for a botanist’s herbarium. Fern leaves will look almost as well ten years after they are gathered as on the day on which they are transferred from the dewy hillside to the dry pages of a book.

Author: David Lester Richardson, 1855.