DESCRIPTIONS OF N.Z. FERNS. H7 



The New Zealand plant, too, produces fertile fronds at not more than three or four 

 years old, while my experience indicates that the European one takes twelve or fifteen 

 years to do so. It seems to me that these differences of growth show pretty plainly 

 that the New Zealand plant is a distinct variety from the European one. The only 

 lingering doubt in my mind arises from the fact that other strange ferns have been 

 found in the same locality. I have seen a few plants of " Horse-shoe fern," " Marattia 

 fraxinea," growing only a few hundred yards distant, though I know of no others 

 within seventy or eighty miles; and the late Mr. Francis Wi'liamson, of Wanganui, a 

 very reliable authority, assured me that the Auckland fern " Lygodium articulatum " 

 used to grow in a neighbouring patch of bush, till it was cut down. These fafts 

 indicate a possibility of some very early settler having taken the trouble to fetch ferns 

 to the locality from a distance, though no one is known to have done so. 



The name " Osmunda " is given to the European plant in consequence of a 

 curious old legend, which relates that, during an invasion of the Danes, one Osmund, 

 a ferryman at Loch Tyne, saved the lives of his wife and daughter, by rowing them to 

 an island, and making them lie down among these ferns, while he was occupied all day 

 and night putting the enemy across the loch. It only grows in very wet situations (at 

 Rangitikei at the edge of a swamp), and is very easily cultivated in good soil, with 

 abundance of water ; in fadl, it is well to keep the pot standing in water. It dies down 

 in early winter, and comes up again in spring. This is a very handsome fern, growing 

 in England usually three to four feet high, and sometimes eight or ten feet. It has a 

 stout, ereft rhizome, and an immense number of hard matted fibrous roots. The New 

 Zealand plant seems to have far more even than the English one, and they have a 

 greater tendency to rise above ground. This rhizome sometimes, in the English plant, 

 becomes a caudex one to two feet high. The stipes is long, yellowish or reddish, 

 stout, and when young sparingly scaly, and covered with soft brown, or yellow down. 

 Rachis the same, but the scales and down generally drop off as the frond develops. 

 The fronds are of two kinds, barren and fertile. The barren ones are broadly 

 lanceolate, and bi-pinnate. The pinnules are stalked, ovate-lanceolate, distinftly 

 veined, thinly coriaceous, and of a bright shining green. The fertile fronds are of 

 the same shape, but a few of the top pinnae have the pinnules contracted into mere 

 double lines of large sori, consisting of many capsules, and looking very like spikes of 

 small flower-buds, whence the name "flowering fern." 



GENUS TODEA (To-de-a), 

 Called after a German Botanist named Todes. It has the sori on the back of leafy 

 portion of frond. 



SUB-GENUS EUTODEA (Yu-to-de-a) 

 Has the texture coriaceous. The only New Zealand plant of this genus is 



