Ferns of the New Jersey Pine Barrens 



Martha H. IIollinsiikad 



At Quaker Bridge, New Jersey, there are river banks, bogs 

 and upland where grow a most varied pinebarren flora. Under 

 pines are sheep laurel and clcthra. There are white cedars, mag- 

 nolias, and viburnums. There are rushes and cotton grass. There 

 are cranberries and teaberries. There are orchids, lycopodiums, 

 drosera, sphagnum, and pitcher plants. We were there in 1937 

 in late September; as I sat in the car looking at the tawny 

 patches of cinnamon fern and the sienna colored cosmopolitan 

 bracken whose stout stipes still held aloft the dried fronds, I 

 remembered that I had often seen in books, not botanical, the 

 expression "ferns and bracken" and the rhyme from Scott: 



"The heath this night must be my bed. 

 The bracken curtain for my head." 



Pteris latiuscula is one of the commonest of the few ferns 

 found in the Pines for that land does not offer situations loved 

 by ferns. Bracken adapts itself to sand and bog. Its long root- 

 stocks may grow ten to twenty feet in a season, sending up 

 numerous fronds. There is a variety, P. latiuscula pseudocau- 

 data, that has the terminal pinnules elongated in various pat- 

 terns. 



With us that day in September was a young woman just 

 beginning to study ferns. She first brought me a frond of Wood- 

 wardia. Both W. virginica {Anchistea virginica) and W. areolata 

 {Lorinseria areolata) are fairly abundant. After cedar swamps 

 have been cut or burned over W. virginica with its creeping 

 rootstocks appears plentifully among the alders and magnolias 

 that follow Typha latifolia and wool grass which spring up at 

 first. Then the young cedars start up again. 



The young lady next brought me a frond of Royal Fern 

 which recalled 0. regalis as seen growing luxuriantly at Miami, 

 Florida. It grows in New Jersey in the shallows beside streams. 

 When next she came to the car she was tattered and torn having 

 crept under cedars and crossed a bog to get Schizaea. She is 

 keen on conservation and only allowed herself to gather two 

 specimens. I took mine home and planted it in a small glass 

 globe with moss and partridge berries. After some weeks it is 

 still alive and interesting. The sterile fronds are very curly and 

 green and the fertile ones still wave their tiny flags. 



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