It was as if giants, playing battledore, had driven a hundred green shuttlecocks to land in the woodcock-haunted shelter. The tangle of their fronds was chin high and you smashed your way through their woody stipes with difficulty, so strong and thick were they. Now they have vanished and scarcely a trace of their presence remains. Brown and brittle stalks rise a little from the earth here and there, and if you search among fallen leaves you may find the ends of their rootstalks with the growth for next year coiled in compact bundles there, ready to unfold.
From these rootstalks spring in all directions slender underground runners whence will grow new plants. But none of this is visible. The only reminder of that once luxurious thicket is the brittle, brown stalks that still, here and there, protrude from the fallen leaves.
It is difficult to see where they all went, but there is something savoring of the supernatural about ferns, anyway. Shakspeare says: “We have the receipt of fern-seed; we walk invisible.” For men to use this receipt the seed must be garnered on St. John’s eve in a white napkin with such and such incantations properly recited. The Struthiopteris germanica had plenty of fern-seed on St. John’s eve. It must have used the old-time incantations with success, for all the giant shuttlecocks that thronged the swale with a close-set tangle of feathery green have vanished.
I sought another moist and shady woodland where all the early spring the ground was a warm pinky brown with the fuzz of uncurling fiddle heads, and later the brown, leaf-carpeted earth was hidden in a delicate lace patterned of the young fronds of the cinnamon and the interrupted fern. To this woodland came the yellow-warblers for the soft fuzz for use in nest building, it compacting readily into a felt-like mass that is at once yielding and durable. The cinnamon fern when it has reached any size has an underground stump that is as woody and tough almost as that of a tree. Its strong fronds are next to those of the ostrich-fern in the woody vigor of their stipes. Surely these might have lasted. Yet not one form of fern life was visible in this once thronged wood. Like the ostrich ferns they had poured their own fern-seed on their heads and whispered the correct incantation at the coming of the first chill wind. I am inclined to think it all happened in a jiffy, when happen it did, for I have been back and forth through that part of the wood all the fall and I cannot recall the day on which they were first missing. It seems as if I would have noticed their gradual crumbling and decay.
The same is true of the clumps of Osmunda regalis that grew here and there along the pond shore. Rightly named “regalis” they stood in royal beauty four or five feet tall and leaning over the water’s edge admired the bipinnate grace of their fronds, while the tallest stalks bore aloft the clusters of spore cases that looked like long spikes of plumed flowers. No wonder the plant which is common to England also drew the notice of Wordsworth, who refers to it as—
“that tall fern,
So stately, of the queen Osmunda named.
Plant lovelier in its own retired abode
On Grassmere beach than naiad by the side
Of Grecian brook.”
Flowering fern it is rightly named, too, but it had flowered and gone, and I found of all its regal beauty but a single stalk with brown spore-cases held rigidly aloft among a tangle of brown leaves and bog grass.
Then I looked for the sensitive fern. This with its slender, creeping rootstock sending up single fronds is less woody than any of the others and I began to suspect that it would have disappeared utterly. So the sterile fronds had. There was no trace of them in spots that in summer were a perfect tangle. But this was not true of the fertile stalks. Here and there these, like the one of the royal fern, stood erect and bore their close-lipped spore cases, seal-brown and stiff, high above dead leaves and other decay of fragile annuals.
All this made a disheartening fern chase, and I turned to the steep side of the hemlock-shaded northern hill, sure of one hardy variety that would have no use for invisibility, however chill the north wind might blow. No smile of direct sunlight ever touches this hill. It is set so steep that only the mid-summer midday sun overtops its slant and this the dense hemlock foliage shuts out. No woodland grasses grow in its dense shadow and only here and there the partridge berry and the pyrola creep down a little from the top of the ridge where some sunlight slips in. Yet in its densest part the Christmas fern revels and throws up fronds that seem to catch some of their dark beauty from the deep green twilight of the place. In the spring these stand in varying degrees of erectness, but autumn seems to bring a change in the cellular structure of the lower part of the stipe and weaken it so that the fronds fall flat upon the earth. They lose none of their firm texture or color, however, and be the temperature ever so low or the snow ever so deep they undergo no further change till the next spring fronds are well under way. Sometimes even in mid-summer you may find the fronds of the year before, somewhat fungi-encumbered and darkened with age, but still green.
No other fern grows in the denser portions of this hemlock twilight, though the Christmas fern clings close to it, and does not spread to the more open glades on other portions of the hill. Another northern hill of similar steepness but shaded by an old growth of pines through which certain sunlight filters during most of the day has specimens of the Polystichum acrostichoides growing only in its most sheltered nooks from which they do not seem to spread even to the brighter spots near by on the same declivity. Hence I infer that the plant prefers the twilight, and does not thrive in even occasional sunlight.