LO 



THE FERN BULLETIN 



the Northern States and Canada. It delights in rich, 

 moist soil and is easily cultivated, soon forming dense 

 mats if planted in a congenial spot. 



It was in a very different location that I first saw 

 the long beech fern, (Phegopteris polypodioides) . I 

 was walking along a path where a wooded hill 

 sloped sharply to .the roadside when a slender fern tip 

 almost thrust itself into my hand from the tangled 

 thicket that completely concealed the rest of the plant. 

 There could be no mistaking it and I eagerly searched 

 for more but found only two plants, though I was told 

 later that quite a colony grew in the vicinity. Like 

 the oak fern it has a slender creeping rootstock and 

 produces fronds all summer. The fronds are rather 

 soft in texture, once pinnate with long narrow pin- 

 nules. In the upper part of the frond the pinnae are 

 attached to the rachis but the lower, pair are usually 

 separate and hang forward and downward in very 

 noticeble way. The sori are quite small and without 

 indusium as in the true polypodies. 



The broad beech fern (Phegopteris hexagoptera) is 

 so much like the long beech fern that it is not always 

 easy for even an expert to decide between them. Gen- 

 erally speaking it is shorter and broader than its rela- 

 tive with the lower pair of pinnae much larger than 

 the others, but the two species shade into each other in 

 a way that is very perplexing and while I labeled some 

 specimens in my herbarium "hexagonoptera" in my 

 blackest ink, conscience later insisted on penciling a 

 question mark after the name. The Puritans were 

 grand folk but they made life rather hard for their 

 descendants. 



The species averages somewhat larger than the long 

 beech fern and the pinnae form a conspicuous angled 

 wing along the rachis the shape of which has suggest- 



