18 THE FLOEAL WOELD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



FERNS AND FERNERIES. 



THE fernery belongs to the truly rustic ratber than the 

 rural department of gardening. Though ferns are 

 beautiful anywhere, and may suitably adorn the trim 

 border, and mingle with ornaments of formal design, 

 they are more at home, more befitting, among tree- 

 stumps, and in boldly designed rock-work or water scenery, where 

 they appear in their proper character of wildness and simplicity. 

 For the sake of convenience, we may now consider the fernery as a 

 special contrivance — a garden in itself ; and usually it is so, being 

 in some way or other separated from other scenes. The requisites 

 of an open-air fernery are ample space, variety of sunshine and 

 sbadow, plenty of moisture, alternations of slopes, hollows, and 

 acclivities of surface, and good shelter from high winds and frosts. 



In smoky town localities, it is difficult to establish ferns in the 

 open air, owing to their delicacy of constitution, and impatience of 

 a dry or smoky air. But in the suburbs of London, any of the 

 ferns that are ordinarily grown in the open air will succeed, as we 

 know by experience, and could name some very flourishing fern 

 gardens at distances varying from two and a half to six miles from 

 St. Paul's. In Mr. Hibberd's garden at Stoke Newington, all 

 the hardy ferns, including even such peculiar things as the moun- 

 tain parsley fern and tbe fountain asplenium, thrive in a most satis- 

 factory manner. 



Ferns artificially grown, and tended with proper care and skill, 

 frequently exceed much in beauty tbose grown by nature. True, 

 we cannot always secure the scene as well as the ferns — we cannot 

 have the dark glen, the dank moss-grown cave, the decayed tree 

 trunk, or the crumbling archway of the waterfall. The scenes 

 amid which ferns grow, the lovely secluded spots which they seek 

 out — shy wood-sprites that they are — are the chief charms of the 

 associations they always suggest to us ; for they do haunt the 

 greenest and coolest nooks, the most mossy and ancient banks above 

 water-bx-ooks that trickle from unseen founts, in the deep recesses 

 of wild rocky caverns, and under the branching arms of twisted 

 grey-beard oaks and ancestral beeches — spots only discovered by the 

 explorer of woodbine coverts and deep-hidden shades, where, search- 

 ing for rare beauty, he finds it far excelling his anticipation, and 

 checking his silent footsteps by sights that bold him breathless with 

 surprise. Yet if we cannot have the mountain dells, and creeping 

 thorns, and purple knolls of wild thyme, we may have the emblems 

 of them in our mural paradise ; we may have the ferns to suggest 

 such things, and to keep alive remembrances of pleasures and of 

 scenes that made a coolness in tbe brain and a freshness in the 

 heart — breathings of fragrance from the green world that sweeten 

 the resting-places in the march of life. 



It is not requisite to the success of an out- door fernery tbat it 

 should be fantastic or complicated in design, but if anything like a 

 collection is to be made, many varied positions and aspects must be 



