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THE OTTAWA NATURALIST 



VOL. XXIV. OTTAWA, SEPTEMBER, 1910 No. 6 



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FERN HUNTING IN ONTARIO. 



By F. J. A. Morris, Port Hope, Ont. 



III. The Adder's Tongue Family. 



The Virginia Rattlesnake, our commonest Grape Fern, is 

 so familiar a sight in our woods that I suppose no fern-hunter 

 can well help being acquainted with it. It looks much like a 

 Bracken, the sterile frond being more or less tripartite with the 

 divisions compoundly pinnate and much dissected; but the base 

 of the stipe is usually reddish and up from the centre of the sterile 

 frond projects the fruiting spike; this ripens in June or July and 

 soon after begins to wither away. There is another species, 

 stouter and much more fleshy, which fruits in September or 

 October, the Ternate Grape Fern (Botrychium obliquum). It was 

 early in August that I first found this plant. Its dark-green 

 fleshv sterile frond is not so finelv dissected as that of B. 

 virginianum and is more or less prostrate or decumbent on the 

 ground; it grows on a long stalk from near the base of the main 

 stipe; the fruiting spike is also thicker and heavier than that of 

 the Virginia Rattlesnake. Its favorite habitat is at the edge of a 

 wood in short dry turf with a sandy or crumbly soil; often in or 

 about cedar alleys, but not deeply shaded in the woods themselves 

 as the Virginia Rattlesnake usually is. Probably many of my 

 readers have never been lucky enough to find more species of 

 Botrychium than these two ; but I have had the good fortune to 

 find (I believe) all the species known to boreal America, except 

 the famous Moon wort {B. Lunaria). 



At the end of June in my first season's fern-hunting (1906), 

 I took two of the schoolboys out to a tamarack swamp near 

 Newtonville, 10 miles west of Port Hope. Our intention was to 

 combine botany with entomology, my pupils being, like myself, 

 interested in coleoptera. In a corner of this swamp is a dense 

 damp cedar w^ood, forming part of the belt of woodlands enclos- 

 ing the swamp. Along its inner side, among sphagnum, cran- 

 berries and pitcher-plants, grow the Arethusa, the Pogonia, the 

 Calopogon and the Cypripedtum spectabile ; and right in the cedar 

 wood (which contains also a few spruces) I knew were some 



