6 
THE BOOK OF 
until the youngsters make a start ; they can then be lifted 
and cut apart for separate potting or planting. Ferns with 
creeping root-stocks are easily propagated by simply cutting 
into pieces, each piece consisting of a growing tip, a frond, 
and its respective bunch of roots. Finally, pieces of old 
crowns carefully cleansed from all dead portions and inserted 
in soil under glass will often develop young plants from 
latent bulbils. The old bases of Hart’s-tongue fronds do this 
freely, each piece producing a clump of youngsters. 
Spores. 
Undoubtedly, however, the propagation of Ferns through 
their spores is the most interesting way of all. Apart from 
the immense number which can so be obtained, certainly at 
some sacrifice of time, there is always the chance when dealing 
with varietal spores of getting something new and so con- 
tributing to the advance of the cult. The chief thing here is to 
start v/ell by only sowing good things. For the beginner the 
Lady Fern, Male Fern, and Hart’s-tongue are perhaps the 
easiest to raise, though the Bracken (P. aquilina), if a good 
tasselled or other variety be sown, is the quickest to reward 
the sower with typical plants. Starting, then, with any one of 
these, we shall find in the early autumn, at the back of the 
fronds, patches or lines of brownish powder, containing the 
spores. Cut off a piece of a frond so furnished and lay it 
on glazed paper in a warm room, and in a few hours we shall 
find the paper apparently stained brown in similarly shaped 
patches. This brown stain is really the spores themselves, 
which have been shed from , the capsules, and if we scrape 
a tiny pinch off and put it under a microscope we shall find 
an incalculable number present, possibly a million or so, and 
therefore quite enough for a beginner to start with. We have 
now the material ; the next thing is to deal with it so as to 
transform it into Ferns. Experts do this in various ways, but 
our practice is as follows: We take a small 2^-inch pot or 
shallow pan, with a hole for drainage, and nearly fill this with 
ordinary Fern compost, first putting in some crocks covered with 
a little moss to admit of drainage, and- on the top of this 
compost we sprinkle some little lumps of loam. We now take 
a kettle of boiling water, and, placing a piece of paper on 
the soil to prevent washing up, saturate it repeatedly until 
the water flows out scalding hot at the bottom. The soil is now 
sterilised, all spores of fungi or moss, or eggs of insects 
are killed, and the coming Fern spores have a fair 
field to start with. When the pot is cold scatter a tiny 
