5. ROYAL FERN. FLOWERING FERN
Osmunda regalis
New Brunswick to Florida, in swampy places. Two to five feet high, occasionally taller.
Sterile fronds.—Twice-pinnate, pinnæ cut into oblong pinnules.
Fertile fronds.—Leaf-like below, sporangia forming bright-brown clusters at their summits.
Perhaps this Royal or Flowering Fern is the most beautiful member of a singularly beautiful group. When its smooth, pale-green sterile fronds, grown to their full height, form a graceful crown which encircles the fertile fronds, it is truly a regal-looking plant. These fertile fronds are leaf-like below, and are tipped above with their flower-like fruit-clusters.
Royal Fern
Like its kinsmen, the Royal Fern appears in May in our wet woods and fields. The delicate little croziers uncurl with dainty grace, the plants which grow in the open among the yellow stars of the early crow-foot, and the white clusters of the spring cress being so tinged with red that they suffuse the meadows with warm color.
Though one of our tallest ferns, with us it never reaches the ten or eleven feet with which it is credited in Great Britain. The tallest plants I have found fall short of six feet. Occasionally we see large tracts of land covered with mature plants that lack a foot or more of the two feet given as the minimum height. This tendency to depauperization one notices especially in dry marshes near the sea.
PLATE V
ROYAL FERN
a Pinnule of Royal Fern
b Showing veining
To the Royal Fern the old herbalists attributed many valuable qualities. One old writer, who calls it the "Water Fern," says: "This hath all the virtues mentioned in other ferns, and is much more effective than they both for inward and outward griefs, and is accounted good for wounds, bruises, and the like."
The title "flowering fern" sometimes misleads those who are so unfamiliar with the habits of ferns as to imagine that they ever flower. That it really is descriptive was proved to me only a few weeks ago when I received a pressed specimen of a fertile frond accompanied by the request to inform the writer as to the name of the flower inclosed, which seemed to him to belong to the Sumach family.
The origin of the generic name Osmunda seems somewhat obscure. It is said to be derived from Osmunder, the Saxon Thor. In his Herbal Gerarde tells us that Osmunda regalis was formerly called "Osmund, the Waterman," in allusion, perhaps, to its liking for a home in the marshes. One legend claims that a certain Osmund, living at Loch Tyne, saved his wife and child from the inimical Danes by hiding them upon an island among masses of flowering ferns, and that in after years the child so shielded named the stately plants after her father.
The following lines from Wordsworth point to still another origin of the generic name:
"—often, trifling with a privilege
Alike indulged to all, we paused, one now,
And now the other, to point out, perchance
To pluck, some flower, or water-weed, too fair
Either to be divided from the place
On which it grew, or to be left alone
To its own beauty. Many such there are,
Fair ferns and flowers, and chiefly that tall fern,
So stately, of the Queen Osmunda named:
Plant lovelier, in its own retired abode
On Grasmere's beach, than Naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook, or Lady of the Mere,
Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance."
The Royal Fern may be cultivated easily in deep mounds of rich soil shielded somewhat from the sun.