At about the same time, down among last year's Christmas Ferns, you find the rolled-up fronds of this year, covered with brown or whitish scales. And now every day for many weeks will appear fresh batches of young ferns. Someone has said that there is nothing more aggressively new-born than a young fern, and this thought will recur constantly as you chance upon the little wrinkled crozier-like fronds, whether they are bundled up in wrappings of soft wool or protected by a garment of overlapping scales, or whether, like many of the later arrivals, they come into the world as naked and puny as a human baby.
Fiddleheads
Once uncurled, the ferns lose quickly this look of infancy, and embody, quite as effectively, even the hardiest and coarsest among them, the slender grace of youth. Early in May we find the Osmundas in this stage of their development. The Royal Fern, smooth and delicate, is now flushing the wet meadows with its tender red. In the open woods and along the roadside the Interrupted and the Cinnamon Ferns wear a green equally delicate. These three plants soon reach maturity and are conspicuous by reason of their unusual size and their flower-like fruit-clusters.
On the rocky banks of the brook, or perhaps among the spreading roots of some forest-tree, the Fragile Bladder Fern unrolls its tremulous little fronds, on which the fruit-dots soon appear. Where there is less moisture and more exposure we may find the Rusty Woodsia, now belying its name by its silvery aspect. At this same season in the bogs and thickets we should look for the curious little Adder's Tongue.
Fragile Bladder Fern
By the first of June many of the ferns are well advanced. On the hill-sides and along the wood-path the Brake spreads its single umbrella-like frond, now pale green and delicate, quite unlike the umbrageous-looking plant of a month later. Withdrawing into the recesses formed by the pasture-rails the Lady Fern is in its first freshness, without any sign of the disfigurements it develops so often by the close of the summer. Great patches of yellowish green in the wet meadows draw attention to the Sensitive Fern, which only at this season seems to have any claim to its title. The Virginia Chain Fern is another plant to be looked for in the wet June meadows. It is one of the few ferns which grows occasionally in deep water.