In the ordinary city house or apartment with hot air, water, 
or steam heat, gas illumination, and few and narrow windows, 
the successful cultivation of any kind of plant is likely to be next 
to impossible. The fumes of burning gas as well as escaping gas 
itself are very poisonous to plants. The effect of the ordinary 
methods of heating city houses is to produce very dry air which 
most plants do not like. Ordinary windows give too little and 
too one-sided illumination, and, it may be noted, the careful 
arrangement of window curtains is not likely to be conducive to 
good plant development, nor should plants be placed in a room 
with particular regard only to their relation to the furniture. 
It is possible, however, to grow Boston ferns in houses with 
good illumination, especially if there is a yard where the plants 
can be placed for the summer to recuperate and obtain a fresh 
start. 
Even under the worst conditions in city apartments, it is pos- 
sible to use ferns and other plants for decoration if one is willing 
to consider them, not as permanent members of the household, 
but rather as temporary visitors, something in the nature of 
flowers which are discarded as soon as their beauty is gone. But 
flowers fade in a few days while a fresh fern plant will last at 
least a month in good condition, if kept moist, and may easily 
keep looking well two or three times as long. Good sized plants 
in six inch pots can be purchased for from seventy-five cents to a 
dollar, with larger plants proportionately more As a further rea- 
son for occasionally renewing the house fern it may be noted that 
not even the florist can grow an old plant so that it looks as well as 
a young plant. This is due to the methods by which new Boston 
fern plants are reproduced and to the fact that the young leaves 
of these ferns, up to a year or so old, are better looking than the 
leaves produced by older plants. 
The Boston fern and its varieties reproduce by runners or 
suckers, slender shoots which spread from near the bases of the 
leaves, either under ground or above it, and take root occasion- 
ally, forming buds and new leaves. These young plants are 
separated from the parent plant and are set out to grow bigger. 
With good conditions each will grow rapidly and finally develop, 
in less than a year, into a good sized plant with numerous fresh 
green leaves, arranged in a symmetrical cluster. This, the 
plant’s most beautiful period, lasts for several months. Later 
leaves appear with brown spots on the back, the little clusters of 
spore-cases. These leaves are hardly as beautiful, or are plants 
at this stage as valuable commercially, as in the younger period. 
I do not of course mean that a fern ceases to be an object of 
beauty when the spore-cases appear, but its pristine freshness 
has been lost, and in purchasing ferns it is well to remember 
