CHAPTER VI 



WILD PLANTS WITH EDIBLE STEMS AND 



LEAVES 



I often gathered wholesome herbs, which I boiled, or eat as 

 salads with my bread. 



Gulliver's Travels, 



WHAT would you say to a dish of ferns on 

 toast? It is quite feasible in the spring, if 

 the Common Bracken (Pteris aquilina, L.) grows 

 in your neighborhood — that coarse, weedy-look- 

 ing fern with long, cord-like creeping root-stocks 

 and great, triangular fronds topping stalks one to 

 two feet high or more, frequent in dry, open woods 

 and in old fields throughout the United States — the 

 most abundant of ferns. The part to be used for 

 this purpose is the upper portion of the young shoot, 

 cut at the period when the fern shoot has recently 

 ])ut up and is beginning to uncurl. The lower part 

 of the shoot, which is woody, and the leafy tip, which 

 is unpleasantly hairy, are rejected. It is the inter- 

 mediate portion that is chosen, and though this is 



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