270 
Rustic Adornments. 
delights ? Few rustic adornments would better have become their sylvan 
home, where shade and coolness, fragrance and verdure, soften the song of 
love and the hymn of praise. 
The fernery belongs to the truly rustic rather than the rural department of 
gardening. Though ferns are beautiful anywhere, and may suitably adorn the 
trim border, and mingle with ornaments of formal design, they are more at 
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. Aye, and even in a town garden overshadowed by lofty buildings 
and walls, where it is almost next to impossible to grow flowering plants, how 
welcome the many forms of our vigorous native ferns are ! How bravely 
they defy the murky atmosphere, and how refreshingly green their fronds 
appear during the spring, summer, and early autumn months ! And again 
how well adapted they are for clothing a dull, damp, and otherwise unat¬ 
tractive area with beautiful fresh greenery, thriving where nothing else will 
succeed. These are only a few of the many typical uses to which hardy 
ferns may be put in the decoration of our gardens, however small they 
may be. 
Ferns artifically 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 secluded 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, searching for rare beauty, he finds it far excelling his anticipa¬ 
tion, 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. 
