58 American Fern Journal 



very 



have been very intimately associated with those little 

 Alpine ferns. Of course, not quite like the first sight, 

 but there are others that last longer, as memory pictures, 

 than those early photographs did. (Of my Andover 

 photo of Prof. Park, most of the outline is gone, leaving 

 only the eyes.) 



I have found the fragrans a good many times since that 

 first day. Sitting wearily one day on a hotel porch, I 

 carelessly turned the spy-glass along the face of a nearby 

 almost perpendicular cliff, when suddenly, those little 

 curling ringlet fronds burst into view. Not in the right 

 place, too much exposed, wrong side of the cliff, yet 

 there it was. With unusual self control I examined the 

 apparent possibilities and quickly rested, I started out 

 with a younger friend (now an expert botanist), then 



corpulent or clumsy young man. We climbed 

 along a narrow shelf till under it. I stood up and held 

 on to the cliff, and as I remember it, he stood on my 

 shoulders, and reached and dropped a part of the fern. 

 And thereby hangs a tale. Sometime after, Mrs. Par- 

 sons (Dana), preparing "How to Find the Ferns," wrote 

 asking where I last found the fern, saying she wanted to 

 gather it herself. In her book the printer made me say 

 it was my "first" time, but she asked for the last, provi- 

 dentially. I told her, but added I doubted her success 



in gathering it. Was I ungallant in not offering to assist 

 her? 



One other experience note— The fragrance. 



I think it was Clute who made the mistake in an early 

 Bulletin of calling the Dicksonia the fragrant fern. Its 

 odor is more like that of Symplocarpvs than like that of 



the Dryopteris. But I have learned this— at only one 



jra g 



Once 



I hit it just in time. Several young ladies to whom I 

 gave fronds declared it the best of perfumes. The 



handkerchipf in ^-n^K t ,i .1 •* e n_. ^icc ^a. 



