JUL 1 3194b 
a- 
O' 
J 
library 
NEW YORK 
BOTANICAL 
garden 
New Zealand Ferns 
A TRIBUTE to the ferns of New Zealand in the 
form of a popular illustrated description may 
Lnot come amiss during the Great War, that 
titanic conflict in which our soldiers have borne the 
National Emblem with honour round the world. The 
enemies of the British Empire have been taught to 
fear, the Allies to respect, the down-trodden peoples to 
hail as deliverers, those vigorous young battalions bear- 
ing as their badge the fern-leaf of New Zealand. 
There can have been no hesitation in choosing the 
fern as the national plant; it is questionable if ferns 
formed so large a proportion of the vegetation in any 
other country as they did in New Zealand before the 
advent of the white man. Even now there are thousands 
upon thousands of acres monopolised by the bracken; 
groves upon groves of tree-ferns in the sequestered 
glades of our forests, on river banks and hillsides; mile 
upon mile of roads, and gullies innumerable bordered 
with the palm-like fronds of Lomaria ; millions of tree 
trunks decked and festooned from root to summit with 
the most beautiful forms imaginable; square miles of 
the moist Westland forests carpeted with the trans- 
lucent cups of the kidney fern. It is the same story 
from one end of the Dominion to the other — ferns 
everywhere ; on surf - beaten rocks, rolling downs, 
swamps, hungry clay land that will hardly support a 
blade of grass, shady forests where they revel in the 
greatest luxuriance, mountain tops up to the snow line, 
upon lava flows — even the black cinder slopes of Rangi- 
toto. 
