Story oF A FeRN GAaRDEN—I 55 
lying along the salt marshes of Newbury, these ferns 
grew by the thousands. To my mind there is no sight 
more beautiful than the unrolling of the fronds of these 
big ferns, and the day I went after them it happened 
that they were in exactly the right condition to trans- 
plant, the crosiers being partly unrolled, so that it was 
easy to select the most vigorous plants. Even with a 
new heavy grub hoe with a very sharp cutting edge, it 
was strenuous work wrestling with the tough old roots 
of these plants, many of which had apparently been 
there for an hundred years or more. Some of the 
clumps that I hewed and pried out must have weighed 
over two hundred pounds, and it was quite an engineer- 
ing feat to get them into the wagon. © These were taken 
home and planted the same day on Osmunda ‘‘island”’ 
in my garden. Actually I won these ferns “by the 
sweat of my brow,’’ and was badly lamed up for the 
next few days. 
The finest clump of the Dodge hybrid (Dryopteris 
cristata x marginalis) that I have in my garden is one 
that I found on Friday, April 13, 1917. Up to that 
date I had never seen this fern growing. So I started 
off in the morning determined to spend the day in hunt- 
‘ing for it, and, incidentally, to try and shatter forever 
the ‘‘Friday, the 13th,” superstition. At that time 
the fronds of all the evergreen ferns were, of course, 
flat on the ground, but I knew a promising rocky valley 
where both the parent ferns grew, and, after hunting 
for about an hour, was rewarded by finding a splendid 
clump of seven plants. The fertile fronds, which had 
been remarkably well preserved by a heavy blanket of 
snow that had covered the ground -most of the winter, 
were large and delightfully irregular, measuring nearly 
three feet in length. 
Although strongly tempted to give details of other 
most interesting journeys after the ferns, I realize that 
