18 
THE FLOEAL WOELD AND GAEDEN GUIDE. 
FERNS AND FERNERIES. 
E fernery belongs to the truly rustic rather than the 
OlU rura ^ department of gardening. Though ferns are 
paw beautiful anywhere, and may suitably adorn the trim 
fftP r i . P ftl border, and mingle with ornaments of formal design, 
are mojg home, more befitting, among tree- 
stumps, and in boldly designed rock-work or water scenery, where 
they appear in their proper character of wildness and simplicity. 
For the sake of convenience, w T e may now consider the fernery as a 
special contrivance — a garden in itself ; and usually it is so, being 
in some way or other separated from other scenes. The requisites 
of an open-air fernery are ample space, variety of sunshine and 
shadow, plenty of moisture, alternations of slopes, hollows, and 
acclivities of surface, and good shelter from high winds and frosts. 
In smoky town localities, it is difficult to establish ferns in the 
open air, owing to their delicacy of constitution, and impatience of 
a dry or smoky air. But in the suburbs of London, any of the 
ferns that are ordinarily grown in the open air will succeed, as we 
know by experience, and could name some very flourishing fern 
gardens at distances varying from two and a half to six miles from 
St. Paul's. In Mr. Hibberd’s garden at Stoke Newington, all 
the hardy ferns, including even such peculiar things as the moun- 
tain parsley fern and the fountain asplenium, thrive in a most satis- 
factory manner. 
Ferns artificially grown, and tended with proper care and skill, 
frequently exceed much in beauty those grown by nature. True, 
we cannot always secure the scene as well as the ferns — we cannot 
have the dark glen, the dank moss-grown cave, the decayed tree 
trunk, or the crumbling archway of the waterfall. The scenes 
amid which ferns grow, the lovely seclnded spots which they seek 
out — shy wood-sprites that they are — are the chief charms of the 
associations they always suggest to us ; for they do haunt the 
greenest and coolest nooks, the most mossy and ancient banks above 
water-brooks that trickle from unseen founts, in the deep recesses 
of wild rocky caverns, and under the branching arms of twisted 
grey-beard oaks and ancestral beeches — spots only discovered by the 
explorer of woodbine coverts and deep-hidden shades, where, search- 
ing for rare beauty, he finds it far excelling his anticipation, and 
checking his silent footsteps by sights that hold him breathless with 
surprise. Yet if we cannot have the mountain dells, and creeping 
thorns, and purple knolls of wild thyme, we may have the emblems 
of them in our mural paradise ; we may have the ferns to suggest 
such things, and to keep alive remembrances of pleasures and of 
scenes that made a coolness in the brain and a freshness in the 
heart — breathings of fragrance from the green world that sweeten 
the resting-places in the march of life. 
It is not requisite to the success of an out- door fernery that it 
should be fantastic or complicated in design, but if anything like a 
collection is to be made, many varied positions and aspects must be 
