XVI.—HOW TO MAKE A FERNERY.
AUTUMN is the time to be getting ready for your fernery—all you who are off in the country (or who live there), or are just getting back from your summer vacation, with a big parcel of ferns and things which you collected at the White Mountains, or among the Green Mountains, or the Berkshire Hills, or at Mount Desert, or in some woods, or by some pond, or by the sea, or somewhere, no matter where—lovely things were around you wherever you went.
I know what you have been doing: for, have I not seen in my summer trips for these twenty years, how you young people do; how it seems as if you wanted to carry all the woods home with you; how, hot and tired, but happy, you have been seen coming back to the farmhouse or hotel where you boarded, with your arms full; how you put your treasures safely away in the coolest, shadiest corner of the back piazza, and asked anxiously if they would keep till you could get them home? And when the morning of packing up came, what a stir to get them all into the smallest possible compass; for were not the older folks of the party all complaining because the boys had cut so many cones, and the æsthetic grown-up daughters had such bundles of cat-tails and sun-flowers, so that the “baggage” was already beyond all bounds of reason!
If it should happen that you have not secured what you would like to stock your fernery with, you can do it now: and if anybody should tell you that those frail-looking things will not stand the journey home, you can answer, on my authority, that they are mistaken. Just get the roots, and you are all right. I have not much doubt that there are ferns growing in a Western city to-day from some dry-looking roots which a lady from New England took out with her, and after being a week on her journey, distributed among her friends, so that the ferneries all about the city were beautiful with them by Christmas time.
There is a good deal of vitality in roots: their hold on life is something wonderful. Plant them, and you will hear from them, as Doctor Franklin did from a seed or two he found in a piece of broom corn, to which, I suppose, all the brooms in the United States may be traced.
Therefore, collect, and have patience. The way is to tear up a whole mass of the greenery from some moist knoll or hummock, moss and all. It will be sure to be full of things, gold-thread, bunch-berry, partridge-berry, mitre-wort and dew-berry; and every one of them will blossom in a fernery in winter. No knowing what will come up out of the moss. Get also from the woods the two-leaved Solomon’s seal—you will know it by the bunch of finely speckled berries; the Indian cucumber root, the rattle-snake plantain, lady’s slipper, wake robin, chick-weed, winter-green, princes’ pine, pyrola. All these and many others will bloom there, and violets. I might make a long list of flowers, besides nearly all kinds of ferns, and mosses. But it is well to get any and every little delicate woods’ plant that you like; roll them up in moss, which will keep them damp enough, and when you get home, fit up your fernery.
But first—in accordance with the principle laid down by the famous Mrs. Glass, in her cook-book, who says about cooking a hare, “first, get your hare,”—you will first get your fernery.
Many persons would have one quickly enough but for thinking the expense too great. But it is not at all important that you have one of those nice black walnut cases with the costly oval or round glass. A home-made one is more convenient, and much cheaper.