ON THE CULTIVATION OF FERNS, 



IV. ON THE CULTIVATION OF 

 FERNS. 



HIS chapter is intended to be short 

 and simple in character. Yet it is 

 hoped that its counsel will be none 

 the less useful and effectual. 



It is somewhat rare, the Author 

 believes, to find, amongst the 

 numerous valuable and useful works 

 that deal with the home cultivation 

 of plants, books that endeavour to 

 make their instructions relate to the 

 natural conditions under which the 

 same plants were found growing pre- 

 viously to what may be called their domestication. Yet 

 most of our methods of cultivation are but adaptations of 

 natural circumstances, and, at least in the case of ferns 

 newly gathered from their native habitats, the closer 

 such natural circumstances or conditions of growth are 

 followed, the more certain will be the success of the 

 adapter ; for it is ignorance of the natural habits of 

 ferns that leads to the most deplorable failures of the 

 growers in pots, rockeries, or cases, of these beautiful, 

 graceful, and interesting plants. 



Hence a careful study of the paragraphs which are 

 headed under the name of each fern, described in 

 these pages, " Habitats," will throw much more light 

 on the subject of cultivation than the most elaborate 

 but merely routine directions for mixing particular 

 soils. 



The natural food of all ferns is leaf-mould, or humus, 

 which is the aggregation in the form of earth of decayed 

 vegetable matter. This is a fact which must be carefully 

 E a 



