Beautiful Ferns

The pleasant odor of the plant remains many years in the herbarium. The early writers compare the fragrance to that of raspberries, and Milde repeats the observation. Hooker and Greville thought it “not unlike that of the common primrose.” Maximowicz states that the odor is sometimes lacking. Milde quotes Redowsky as saying that the Yakoots of Siberia use the plant in place of tea; and, having tried the experiment myself, I can testify to the not unpleasant and very fragrant astringency of the infusion.

The illustration is taken from a plant collected by Mr. D. A. Watt on the Saguenay River, in Canada.

ASPIDIUM GOLDIANUM, Hooker.

Goldie’s Wood-Fern

Aspidium Goldianum: – Root-stock stout, ascending, chaffy; stalks about a foot long, chaffy at the base with large ovate-acuminate ferruginous or deep-lustrous-brown scales; fronds standing in a crown, one to two and a half feet long, broadly ovate, or the fertile ones oblong-ovate, chartaceo-membranaceous, nearly smooth, bright-green above, a little paler beneath, pinnate; pinnæ broadly lanceolate, five to eight inches long, one to two and a half broad, usually, especially the lowest ones, narrower at the base than in the middle, pinnatifid almost to the midrib; segments numerous, oblong-linear, often slightly falcate, crenate, or serrate with sharp incurved teeth; veins free, mostly with three veinlets, the lowest superior veinlets bearing near their base the large sori very near the midvein; indusium large, flat, smooth, orbicular with a narrow sinus.

Aspidium Goldianum, Hooker, in Goldie’s Acc. of rare Canad. Pl. in Edinb. Phil. Journ., vi., p. 333; Fl. Am. – Bor., ii., p. 260. – Torrey, Fl. New York, ii., p. 495. – Gray, Manual, ed. ii., p. 598, ed. v., p. 666. – Mettenius, Fil. Hort. Lips., p. 92; Aspid., p. 56. – Williamson, Ferns of Kentucky, p. 95, t. xxxiv.

Nephrodium Goldianum, Hooker & Greville, Ic. Fil. t. cii. – Hooker, Sp. Fil., iv., p. 121. – Hooker & Baker, Syn. Fil., p. 272.

Lastrea Goldiana, Presl, Tent. Pterid., p. 76. – Lawson, in Canad. Nat. i., p. 282.

Dryopteris Goldiana, Gray, Manual, ed. i., p. 631.

Aspidium Filix-mas, Pursh, Fl. Am. Sept., ii., p. 662.

Hab. – Deep, rocky woods, from Canada and Maine to Indiana, Virginia and Kentucky. It is also named in local catalogues of the flora of Wisconsin and Kansas. Not known in the Old World.

Description: – The root-stock is creeping or ascending, several inches long, and nearly an inch thick. This thickness is made up, in considerable part, by the adherent bases of old stalks; the stalks being perfectly continuous with the root-stock, and so much crowded as to overlap each other. When fresh the root-stock is fleshy, and a longitudinal section of it shows that its substance passes so gradually into that of the stalk-bases, that no point of separation or distinction between the two can be selected. This kind of root-stock is found also in Aspidium spinulosum and its allies, in A. Filix-mas, A. cristatum, A. marginale, A. Nevadense, A. fragrans, and A. rigidum, and in very many exotic species, and it is very unlike the root-stocks of A. Thelypteris, A. Noveboracense, and A. unitum, species which have been already described and figured in the present work. The parenchymatous portion of the root-stock is loaded with starch in very minute grains, as may be easily proved by adding a drop of alcoholic solution of iodine to a thin slice of the root-stock placed under a microscope, when the grains will be presently seen to turn blue, the recognized sign of starch. This abundance of nutritive material in the root-stock enables it to send up a fine circle of large fronds in the proper season of the year.

The stalks are from nine to fifteen inches long, rather stout, green when living, but straw-color when dried for the herbarium, in which condition they are furrowed in front and along the two sides. At the base they are covered with large ovate-acuminate brown or sometimes dark and shining scales. Mixed in with these are smaller and narrower chaffy scales, which also are found along the whole length of the stalk and the rachis. The cross-section of the stalk shows two rather large roundish fibro-vascular bundles on the anterior side, and three, the middle one largest, at the back.

Several fronds are usually seen growing from a root-stock, those produced early in the season commonly sterile, and shorter than the others. The full-grown and fertile fronds are often two feet or two and a half feet long, and about one foot broad. The general outline is oblong-ovate, the lowest pinnæ being scarcely, if at all, shorter than those in the middle of the frond. There are usually about eight or ten full-sized pinnæ each side of the rachis, besides the gradually diminishing pinnæ near the acute pinnatifid apex. The larger pinnæ are from five to eight inches long, the middle ones an inch or an inch and a half wide, but the lowest ones two inches and a half broad. The greatest breadth of the pinnæ is usually near the middle or even a little above the middle, so that they are slightly narrowed towards the base; and in this character lies one of the readiest distinctions between this fern and those large forms of A. cristatum, which have occasionally been mistaken for A. Goldianum; for in that other species the greatest breadth of the pinnæ is uniformly at the base.

The segments of the pinnæ are from fifteen to twenty each side the midrib: the incisions do not extend quite to the midrib, so that the latter is narrowly winged, and the pinnæ are pinnatifid rather than pinnate. The segments are from nine to eighteen lines long, and about three lines wide: they are set rather obliquely on the midrib, and are often slightly curved upwards, or falcate. They are obtuse or somewhat acute, and have the edges crenate, or more or less distinctly serrate with sharp incurved teeth.

The veins are free, and are pinnately forked into from three to five slender oblique veinlets, of which the lowest one on the upper side is the longest, and bears a fruit-dot near its base. The fruit-dots are seldom or never found on the two or three lowest pinnæ, but on the rest they are arranged in a row each side the midveins of the segments, and much nearer the midveins than the margins. There are in all from ten to twenty to a segment.

The indusia are larger than in most of the related species, flat, perfectly smooth, orbicular with a very narrow sinus, and slightly erose-crenulate on the margin. In the second edition of Gray’s Manual it is said that the indusium is “often orbicular without a distinct sinus, as in Polystichum;” and it is sometimes difficult to see the sinus, but I think it is rather because the sides of it overlap than because there is none. The sporangia have a ring of from fifteen to twenty articulations. The spores are ovoid, and somewhat roughened on the surface.

This fern is one of the very finest and largest of the species of the Eastern States, being surpassed in these respects only by the osmundas and the ostrich-fern. The fronds are smooth, deep-green in color, slightly paler beneath, and of a rather firm papery texture. Unlike A. Filix-mas and A. cristatum the fronds wither in the fall of the year, and are not “half-evergreen.”

It was collected by Pursh on his visit to America in the early part of this century, the precise locality not known, – in the Flora he says “New Jersey to Virginia,” – and was by him referred to A. Filix-mas. His specimens, preserved in the herbarium at Kew, are partly A. Goldianum and partly A. cristatum. Mr. John Goldie’s discovery was made near Montreal, about the year 1818, and the excellent figure in Hooker & Greville’s Icones Filicum was probably taken from one of his specimens, or perhaps from live plants originally brought by him to the Botanic Garden at Glasgow.

Though not one of our commonest Ferns, this is very abundant in certain localities: – Mrs. Roy sends it from Owen Sound, Canada; Dr. Bumstead got it in Smuggler’s Notch, Mt. Mansfield, Vermont; Mr. Frost has a fine station on Mt. Wantastiquet, New Hampshire; I find it plentiful and fine in the deep ravine called Roaring Brook, in Cheshire, Connecticut; Professor Porter has it from Burgoon’s Gap, in the Alleghany Mountains of Pennsylvania; Mrs. McCall, near Madison, Ohio; Mr. Williamson “found it in great abundance near the Little Rockcastle River, in Laurel County,” Kentucky, and Mr. Curtis has twice sent me fine specimens, with very dark scales at the base of the stalks, from the Peaks of Otter, Virginia.

The name is sometimes written Goldieanum; I give the name as it occurs in Goldie’s original paper in the Edinburgh Philosophical Journal.

The specimen drawn by Mr. Faxon is from Vermont, and is represented about two-thirds of the natural size.

CHEILANTHES TOMENTOSA, Link.

Webby Lip-Fern

Cheilanthes tomentosa: – Root-stock short, chaffy with glossy subulate scales; stalks tufted, four to eight inches long, erect, rather stout, clothed with soft woolly pale-ferruginous hairs, intermixed with others which are flattened and decidedly paleaceous; fronds eight to fifteen inches long, oblong-lanceolate, webby-tomentose with slender brownish-white obscurely articulated hairs, especially beneath, tripinnate; primary and secondary pinnæ oblong or ovate-oblong; ultimate pinnules closely placed, but distinct, roundish-obovate, sessile, or adnate to the tertiary rachis, one-half to three-fourths of a line long, the terminal ones twice longer; involucres whitish, continuous round the pinnule and very narrow.

Cheilanthes tomentosa, Link, “Hort. Berol., ii., p. 42.” – Fil. Hort. Berol., p. 65. – Kunze, in Sill. Journ., July, 1848, p. 87; in Linnæa, xxiii., p. 245. – Gray, Manual, ed. ii., p. 592. – Mettenius, Fil. Hort. Lips., p. 50; Cheilanthes, p. 37. – Eaton, in Chapman’s Flora, p. 590; Ferns of the South-West, p. 314. – Baker, Syn. Fil., p. 140. – Williamson, Ferns of Kentucky, p. 49, t. xi.

Myriopteris tomentosa, Fée, Gen. Fil., p. 149, t. xii., A., f. 2 (a pinnule). – Fournier, Pl. Mex., Crypt., p. 125 (species exclusa).

Notholæna tomentosa, J. Smith.

Cheilanthes Bradburii, Hooker, Sp. Fil., ii., p. 97, t. cix., B.– Mettenius, Cheilanthes, p. 37.

Hab. – Sandstone rocks along the French Broad River, in North Carolina and Eastern Tennessee, Professor Gray, Mr. Canby, Rev. D. R. Shoop, Professor Bradley, etc. Texas, Lindheimer, No. 743. Mountains of Virginia (?) and Kentucky, according to Gray’s Manual, but Mr. Williamson has hitherto failed to find it in the last named State. The Kew herbarium contains, besides Lindheimer’s plant, a very imperfect specimen marked “Manitou Rocks, 250 miles up the Missouri, Bradbury,” and good specimens from Texas collected by Drummond. Kunze states that it was raised [at the Leipzig garden?] from Mexican spores, and that Rugel collected a few specimens in North Carolina; but Fournier rejects it as a Mexican species.

Description: – This is decidedly the largest plant among all our North American species of Cheilanthes, some of the tallest specimens measuring nearly two feet in total length. The root-stock is short, and disposed to branch. It is thickly clad with fine subulate chaff, many of the scales with a dark and rigid midnerve, and others lighter-colored and without midnerve. The plant evidently grows in dense masses. The stalks are clustered, each root-stock sending up a large number of them. They are rigid, wiry, terete and covered with grayish-tawny spreading soft woolly hairs, intermixed with a few which are broader and decidedly paleaceous, especially towards the base. The section is round, and shows a firm exterior sclerenchymatous sheath, within which is a broad circle of brownish parenchyma, and in the middle a single fibro-vascular bundle obtusely triangular in shape, but with the sides slightly hollowed in.

The fronds vary from a few inches to over a foot in length; their general shape is ovate-lanceolate, or oblong-lanceolate; they are in general of a grayish color from the abundance of a fine entangled tomentum, which covers both surfaces, though it is a little thinner and whiter on the upper surface. The large fronds are fully tripinnate. The primary pinnæ are oblong-ovate, short-stalked, one to nearly two inches long, and a half to three-fourths of an inch broad at the base. They are either opposite or alternate, the lower ones, as usual, more separated than those that are higher up on the frond. The secondary pinnæ are close-placed, oblong, obtuse, and again pinnated into from two to five minute rounded or rounded-obovate sessile or adnate-decurrent pinnules on each side, besides a terminal oval pinnule which is twice as large as the lateral ones. These ultimate pinnules are innumerable, and it is in allusion to their very great number in this and the allied species that the generic name Myriopteris was proposed by Fée for the group.

The whole margin of the pinnule is recurved, and from the edge of it is produced a very delicate whitish involucre, the whole forming a sort of pouch, as is admirably represented in the figure given by Fée. The sporangia have a ring of about twenty articulations: Fée says there are vittate or knotted hairs growing among them. The spores are rather large, amber-colored, globose, and delicately trivittate. According to Fée, when placed in water they burst and dissolve into excessively minute sporules.

There can be no doubt that our plant is the Cheilanthes tomentosa of Link. Kunze, who knew Link’s plant perfectly well, referred the North Carolina specimens to it; and Dr. Mettenius, who succeeded to the care of the Leipzig garden, favored me with specimens which are precisely the same thing as the plant here described. But none of the Mexican collectors seem to have found the species, and it may be legitimately queried whether the commonly reported origin of Link’s specimens is the true one. The Cheilanthes tomentosa of the Species Filicum is partly this plant, but mainly the species next to be described.

CHEILANTHES EATONI, Baker.

Eaton’s Lip-Fern

Cheilanthes Eatoni: Root-stock short, chaffy with rather long slenderly acuminate glossy scales; stalks clustered, four to eight inches long, erect, wiry, covered, as are the rachis and its divisions, with narrow shining pale-ferruginous scales and paleaceous hairs intermixed; fronds four to nine inches long, oblong-lanceolate, pubescent above with whitish entangled woolly hairs, beneath covered with a heavy matted ferruginous tomentum, and more or less scaly, especially when young, tripinnate; pinnæ ovate-oblong, lower ones rather distant, upper ones crowded; ultimate pinnules contiguous, half a line long, rounded, but narrowed at the base, the terminal ones often twice larger and more decidedly obovate; margin of the pinnules continuously recurved, the edge slightly membranaceous.

Cheilanthes Eatoni, Baker, Syn. Fil., p. 140. – Porter & Coulter, Synopsis of the Flora of Colorado, p. 153. – Eaton, Ferns of the South-West, p. 315.

Cheilanthes tomentosa, Hooker, Sp. Fil., ii., p. 96 (description and Texas plant), t. cix., A.– Eaton, in Botany of the U. S. and Mexican Boundary Survey, p. 234.

Hab. – Texas and New Mexico, Wright, No. 816; Fendler, No. 1016; Indian Territory, between Fort Cobb and Fort Arbuckle, Palmer; near Cañon City, Colorado, Brandegee; from the Rio Grande westward along the Gila to the Colorado River, Collectors of Mexican Boundary Survey. The kind of place where this fern has been collected is not recorded, but it probably grows in the clefts of rocks along the sides and edges of cañons.

Description: – This fern bears so close a resemblance to Cheilanthes tomentosa, that it is not at all surprising that there has been more or less of confusion between the two. It would seem that when writing his account of the genus Cheilanthes for the Species Filicum, Sir W. J. Hooker had, in his collection, no examples of the North Carolina C. tomentosa, and could identify it only by Link’s rather imperfect description and Kunze’s remarks in Silliman’s Journal. Having Wright’s specimens of the plant here described, and Gordon’s fern from the Rattene Mountains – a plant not yet satisfactorily identified – he referred them to the species named by Link; and then perceiving with his accustomed delicate discrimination that Lindheimer’s and Bradbury’s plant was distinct from Wright’s, he gave the former the name of C. Bradburii. It was not until 1860, when the Ferns for Chapman’s Flora were being prepared, that any one suspected that the C. Bradburii was the true C. tomentosa. In 1866, I had an opportunity of explaining the matter to Mr. Baker, then at work on the Synopsis Filicum, and not long after, I was surprised, and I need not say pleased, by finding that he had given to Hooker’s C. tomentosa the name it now bears.

The root-stock is short, assurgent, and chaffy with rather rigid slender-pointed scales, most of them furnished with a dark midnerve. The stalks are tufted, and are perhaps a little slenderer than those of C. tomentosa. They are chaffy throughout, but more especially at the base, with narrow pale ferruginous scales, intermixed with still slenderer paleaceous hairs. The section is slightly flattened on the anterior side. The exterior sheath is firm; inside of it is brownish parenchyma, and in the middle a semicircular fibro-vascular bundle, the ducts in the centre of it arranged in a figure much like a letter X.

The fronds are considerably smaller than in C. tomentosa. They are similarly oblong-lanceolate and tripinnate, the ultimate pinnules being very numerous and rather more closely crowded than in the other species just referred to. The pubescence is harsher and not so webby on the upper side, and is decidedly heavier and more matted on the under surface. The scales of the branches, or secondary rachises, are broader and shorter than those of the stalk and are very conspicuous in young fronds. In older fronds they fall away, to some extent, and are then less abundant.

The pinnules are rather rounder and less oval than in C. tomentosa, and though they are somewhat purse-shaped, the involucre consists almost entirely of the recurved herbaceous margin, the proper whitish and delicately membranous involucre being nearly suppressed.

The spores are sub-globose, amber-colored, faintly trivittate, and have a finely pustulated or granular surface.

In respect to the narrow herbaceous involucre this fern comes nearest to Cheilanthes lanuginosa, of Nuttall, figured in “Ferns of North America.” It has, however, much larger fronds; and the copious, though narrow scales of the stalk, as well as the scales of the rachises, will readily distinguish it.

It is among the Ferns which have been cultivated by Hon. J. Warren Merrill, though I am not informed what are its special needs in the way of soil, moisture, etc.

ASPIDIUM FILIX-MAS, Swartz.

Male Fern

Aspidium Filix-mas: – Root-stock short, stout, ascending or erect; stalks rarely over a foot long, very chaffy with large lanceolate-acuminate scales and smaller ones intermixed; fronds standing in a crown, one to three feet long, half-evergreen, firm-membranaceous, broadly oblong-lanceolate, slightly narrowed toward the base, pinnate or sub-bipinnate; pinnæ lanceolate-acuminate from a broad base, pinnatifid almost or rarely quite to the midrib; segments smooth and full-green above, slightly paler and bearing a few little chaffy scales beneath, normally oblong, obtuse or even truncate, slightly toothed, in another form ovate-lanceolate, acutish and pinnately incised; veins free, forked or pinnately branched into from two to five veinlets; sori rather large, nearer the midvein than the margin, commonly occurring only on the lower half or two-thirds of each segment; indusia convex when young, rather firm, smooth or minutely glandular, orbicular-reniform.

Aspidium Filix-mas, Swartz, in Schraders Journal, ii., (1800) p. 38; Syn. Fil., p. 55. – Schkuhr, Krypt. Gew., p. 45, t. 44. – Willdenow, Sp. Pl., v., p. 259. – Link, Fil. Hort. Berol., p. 105. – Ruprecht, Distr. Krypt. Vasc, in Imp. Ross., p. 35. – Kunze, in Sill. Journ., July, 1848, p. 83. – Mettenius, Fil. Hort. Lips., p. 92; Aspidium, p. 55. – Eaton, in Gray’s Manual, ed. v., p. 666. – Milde, in Nov. Act. Acad. Nat. Cur., xxvi., ii., p. 507; Fil. Eur. et Atl., p. 118. – Miquel, Prolusio Fl. Jap., p. 117.

Polypodium Filix-mas, Linnæus, Sp. Pl. p. 1551.

Polystichum Filix-mas, Roth, “Fl. Germ., iii., p. 82.” – Koch, Syn. Fl. Germ, et Helv., ed. iii., p. 733.

Nephrodium Filix-mas, Richard, “in Desvaux, Mém. Soc. Linn., vi., p. 60.” – Hooker, Brit. Ferns, t. 15; Sp. Fil., iv., p. 117. – Hooker & Baker, Syn. Fil., p. 272 (excl. vars. γ and δ).

Dryopteris Filix-mas, Schott, Gen. Fil. – Newman, Hist. Brit. Ferns, ed. iii., p. 184.

Lastrea Filix-mas, Presl, Tent. Pterid., p. 76. – Moore, Brit. Ferns, Nat. Pr., t. xiv, xv, xvi, xvii.

Var. incisum, Mettenius: – Frond ample, two to three feet long, scantily chaffy on the rachis; segments rather distant, lanceolate, tapering to a sub-acute point, incised on the margins with serrated lobules; indusium rather delicate, in age shrivelling or falling off. – Aspidium, p. 55; Milde, Fil. Eur. et Atl., p. 120. —Lastrea Filix-mas, var. incisa, Moore, l.c. —Nephrodium Filix-mas, var. affine, Hooker & Baker. l.c.

Var. paleaceum, Mettenius: – Frond ample, two to three feet long, stalk and rachis very chaffy with ferruginous or blackish scales; segments oblong, truncate, nearly entire on the margins; indusium coriaceous, the edges much incurved, sometimes splitting in two. – Aspidium, p. 55; Milde, Fil. Eur. Atl., p. 121. —Lastrea Filix-mas, var. paleacea, Moore, l.c. —Aspidium paleaceum, Don, “Prodr. Fl. Nepal., p. 4;” Fournier, Pl. Mex., Crypt., p. 92. Aspidium parallelogrammum, Kunze, in Linnæa, xiii., p. 146, etc. —Nephrodium Filix-mas, var. parallelogrammum, Hooker, Sp. Fil., iv., p. 116. —Dichasium parallelogrammum and D. patentissimum, Fée, Gen. Fil., p. 302, t. xxiii, B.—Lastrea truncata, Brackenridge, Fil. of U. S. Expl. Exped., p. 195, t. 27 (admirable).1

Hab. – In one form or another, this species occurs in America from Greenland to Peru, throughout Europe and Asia, in parts of Africa, and in many islands of the ocean. The ordinary European form corresponding to Moore’s plate XIV has been collected in British Columbia by Dr. Lyall, in Keweenaw Peninsula of Northern Michigan by Dr. Robbins, and in the mountains of Colorado by Messrs. Hall & Harbour and Mr. Brandegee. Var. incisum was found at the base of calcareous rocks at Royston Park, Owen Sound, Ontario, Canada, by Mrs. Roy, and in the mountains of Colorado by Dr. Scovill, for one of whose specimens I am indebted to D. A. Watt, Esq., of Montreal. Fragments of apparently the same form have been received from Dakota. The Californian plant mentioned in Plantæ Hartwegianæ, p. 342, is better regarded as a form of Aspidium rigidum. Var. paleaceum has not been found in either Canada or the United States, but is well known in Mexico, in Europe, in Southern Asia, in the Hawaiian Islands, etc.

Description: – This fern has a stout, usually ascending, but sometimes erect, very chaffy root-stock, very much like that of the species last described. It sometimes rises a little above the surface of the ground, forming a short trunk.

The stalks seem to vary a good deal in length, being sometimes only two or three inches long, and at other times over a foot. They are clustered at the growing end of the root-stock, and their bases, which remain long after the rest has perished, are consolidated with the root-stock. The stalks are always more or less chaffy, the chaff mainly confined to the lowest portion in some plants, and in others following the stalk and the rachis to the apex of the frond. The largest scales are sometimes fully an inch long. They are narrowly lanceolate-acuminate, distantly ciliate-denticulate on the margin, and composed of narrow but somewhat sinuous cells. Mixed in with them are smaller scales, from two to four lines long, and more distinctly ciliate-toothed. The color of the scales is different in different specimens, varying from bright golden-brown to ferruginous-brown with a darker spot at the base, and from this to nearly black, especially in the sub-tropical and tropical forms of var. paleaceum. Such specimens are sometimes fairly shaggy with the abundance of scales, which are also found, decreasing in number and in size, on the midribs of the pinnæ, and even on the lower surface of the segments. The usual number of fibro-vascular bundles is seven.