Ferns

Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)

a large group or order of flowerless plants. They vary in size from tiny, hair-like creepers to tree ferns forty feet high and a foot in diameter. There are 165 kinds of wild ferns in the United States , with not over twenty in any one locality. There are about 5,940 species of ferns in the world. Jamaica has 550 different ferns, Java has 600. The waving leaf-like plumes of the fern are known to botanists as fronds. Ferns have no flowers, but the observer will notice black or brown fruit dots on the under surface or margin of the fronds. These on ripening produce a shower of dust-like spores from which new plants arise by a peculiar process. The spore grows into a heart-shaped bit that produces a seed-like cell from which a new fern springs up. New ferns are produced also by root-stocks whose tips get ready in the summer for spring growth. One of our ferns, called the walking leaf, has long, drooping fronds or leaves, the tips of which reach the ground and take root, making new plants. Other American ferns are, first of all, the maidenhair, with black polished stipes and foliage that never gets wet; the hart's-tongue, with fruit dots in two lines, like the feet of a centipede; the shield fern and the bladder fern, named from the shape of their fruit dots; the climbing fern, that climbs over bushes; and the cinnamon fern, clothed with cinnamon-colored wool in early spring. Ferns may be made to adorn old foundations and unsightly corners; the wild varieties are the best. Transplant them in the fall or early spring, set in a shady place out of the wind, and cover the roots with a few inches of rotten leaf mold from the forest. A superstition was current in England at one time that fern seed gathered on St. John's Eve renders the bearer invisible.