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R us tic A dornments. 
Yet another example may be cited. Assuming the reader to have a 
small structure only, and a desire to utilise this for growing ferns and 
flowers, he can construct a rockery under the staging and plant ferns in this, 
together with Selaginella Kraussiana and Trcidescantia zebrina . Then on 
the staging above, flowering and foliage plants with a few of the choicest 
ferns may be grown. The roof also may be turned to account for suspending 
ferns in baskets and other creepers; and the end wall, if any, covered with 
cork pockets filled with ferns and trailing plants. A small greenhouse thus 
arranged is depicted in the accompanying illustration. 
In the formation of a greenhouse fernery it is not enough to gratify a 
particular taste, which, by the way, may happen to be a bad taste; it is 
essential to provide for the plants, so that there shall be no struggle with 
difficulties afterwards to keep them alive. If the work is well done, the ferns 
will grow and fill their owner with delight, and nothing short of the most 
luxuriant growth possible should satisfy the cultivator. Enough has been said 
perhaps on the form and construction of the house, and the next point for 
consideration is the rockery. Now, it is necessary to guard against a fatal 
error in this matter. We occasionally obtain a peep into ferneries that are 
founded on a delusion. We see fantastic pyramids and arches studded with 
myriads of sharp projections in the fashion of stalactites, the colouring of the 
whole a repulsive tone of bright yellowish grey, the material being furnace 
clinkers artistically coloured, with not a crumb of soil for the ferns to root 
in except what can be thrust into wretched little “pockets" of the capacity 
of a tea-cup each. There may be in the house a few good ferns in pots on 
the floor, or surrounding a fountain in the centre, and a few more very bad 
ones in pots thrust into unhappy chinks in the fanciful rockery ; but the affair 
at best is only a costly extension of the idea on which a peep-show at a 
country fair is founded. The sham stalactites are the attraction, if there be 
any attraction, and the deluded folks who declare it “ beautiful,” declare also 
by that utterance that they have not the least idea of what a fernery should 
be, or what ferns require. A fernery is for ferns, and must be so ordered that 
ferns will thrive in it. One good tuft of maiden-hair or marine asplenium, 
beaded with moisture and glistening with health, is to be preferred to all the 
painted clinkers and childish frippery that was ever seen in a house of this 
kind, no matter what it may have cost, or how much weariness and solicitude 
may have been entailed upon the owner to secure its construction. We must 
have first of all a mass of soil, that the ferns may have abundant root-room, 
