62 



CASSELL'S POPULAR GARDENING. 



All I had hitlierto met with seemed slender species, 

 not more than twelve feet high, and they gave not 

 the least idea of the supreme beauty of tress bearing 

 their elegant heads of fronds more than thirty feet 

 in the air. There is nothing in tropical vegetation 

 so perfectly beautiful." 



STOVE KINDS. 



A. armata is one of the commonest species in 

 cultivation, and in a wild state is found through- 

 out the whole of tropical America. The large, 

 firm - textured, tripinnatifid or tripinnate fronds, 

 have densely pilose rachises and ribs, not scaly, 

 as in some of its allies. A. atrovirens, from 

 South Brazil, has tripinnatifid, somewhat leathery 

 fronds, with glabrous, smooth or warted, duU 

 straw-coloured rachises, both surfaces being green, 

 glabrous, and without scales. A. ferox has tripin- 

 nate fronds, with brownish straw-coloured rachises, 

 the main ones often covered with conspicuous, hard, 

 but rather small excrescences ; the texture is thin, 

 not leathery, and both surfaces are bright green in 

 colour, the ribs being slightly hairy. This species is 

 spread through the whole of tropical America. A. 

 aspera, from the West Indies, has the stipes and 

 rachises armed with strong prickles, which impart a 

 distinct aspect to the plant ; the leathery fronds are 

 bipinnate. A. pruinata is quite unarmed (that is to 

 say, it does not possess either the hard excrescences 

 of A. ferox or the prickles of A. aspera) ; the stipe 

 is densely woolly at the base, and the leathery, dis- 

 tinctly glaucous frond is either twice or thrice 

 pinnate. This extends from the' West Indies and 

 tropical America to Chili and Juan Fernandez. A. 

 sagittifolia, a comparatively recent introduction from 

 Trinidad, has rigid leathery fronds, four to six feet 

 long, green and glabrous on both surfaces, the under 

 side bearing, however, a few broad white scales on 

 the ribs; the rachises are straw-coloured and 

 warted, with a few pale-coloured adpressed scales 

 beneath. A. Tcsnitis is a Brazilian species, with 

 large, bipinnate, rather firm-textured fronds, with 

 distant glabrous stalked acuminate pinnules. 



GREEN-HOUSE KINDS. 



A. Australis, a native of Tasmania and Australia, 

 has large fronds, deep green above and somewhat 

 glaucous beneath ; the stipe measiu-es about a foot and 

 a half in length, and is clothed with very long, firm, 

 subulate scales ; the main rachises, which, like the 

 stipes, are straw-coloured, are also armed with short, 

 hard, prickle-Hke excrescences. This species was met 

 with in profusion by Backhouse in Tasmania. That 

 author describes it as having stems of all degrees of 

 elevation, up to twenty-five or thirty feet, some of 

 them at the lower part as stout as a mail's body ; the 



whole length clothed with the bases of old leaves, 

 which were rough, like the stems of raspberries, 

 closely tiled over each other, and pointing upwards. 

 Some of the larger fronds were thirteen feet long, 

 making the diameter of the crest twenty-six feet. 

 The New Zealand A. Colensoi is a beautiful species, 

 of smaller stature than many of its allies, and there- 

 fore more suitable for general cultivation. The 

 small stem rarely exceeds four or five feet in height, 

 and the bases of the short, unarmed stipes are 

 densely clothed with silvery subulate scales an inch 

 in length, and the rest of the stipes, the rachises 

 and ribs, covered with lesser dark brown ones. A 

 New Zealand correspondent of The Garden thus 

 wrote of A. Colensoi a few years ago : — " This is a 

 sub-arboreous fern of great beauty. Though the 

 fronds, which are of a soft and pleasing shade of 

 green, are of a very large size, some three feet to 

 four feet long, and ten inches to twenty inches 

 broad, yet the trunk is rarely of any size, so that it 

 is a fern particularly suited for cultivation in low 

 fern-houses. The specimen which I came upon, on 

 the edge of the beech-hollow, was a very luxuriant 

 one, and yet the trunk was not a foot high. From 

 its name, the Alsophila ought to be a 'lover of 

 groves,' yet, though I came across numerous speci- 

 mens, I observed they were all in the open. It 

 seems to delight on the shady slope of an unwooded 

 hill, and it grows by preference in the moist beds of 

 the small runnels that drain such slopes. This fern 

 cannot be too strongly recommended for pot-ciilture. 

 It is a free-growing species, possessing no delicacy, 

 except of tint, but of a bold outline, both of frond 

 and plant, and very soft in the texture." A. Cooperi, 

 from Queensland and New South Wales, is tho- 

 roughly distinct specifically from the larger-growing 

 A. excelsa, under w^hich it was until recently placed 

 as a variety. It has bright green, nearly naked, 

 tripinnate fronds, with straw - coloured, warted 

 rachises. The Norfolk Island A. excelsa is probably 

 the tallest grower of all the Alsophilas ; it is stated 

 by Captain King to attain a height of eighty feet. 

 A trunk cut down by Allan Cunningham measured 

 fifty-seven feet, without the fronds. The late Mr. 

 James Backhouse, writing of this species, says : — 

 " The fronds are from seven to twelve feet long, and 

 are produced in such quantity as to make this noble 

 fern excel the princely Palm-tree in beauty. It 

 usually has its root near the course of some main 

 stream, but as its trunk rises to fifty feet in height, 

 and its top does not affect the shade, like many of 

 its congeners, it forms a striking object in the land- 

 scape." The "heart," or so-called "cabbage," at 

 the extremity of the trunk in this and some other 

 species, affords a coarse kind of food, which is used 

 by the natives as an article of diet. In substance it 



