SHAKESPEARE’S GARDEN 
114 
most fascinating study. Surely the pleasure of record¬ 
ing a new plant for our county or country, or, rarer 
still, one unknown to science, is a far surer and more 
enduring memorial than a perishing gravestone on a 
forgotten grave. The second great natural kingdom 
of plants—the cryptogamic plants, which have no 
true flowers, and are reproduced by naked spores— 
are divided into ferns, club-mosses and their allies, 
liverworts, mosses, lichens, algse, and fungi, and 
vary from most minute diatoms to gigantic tree- 
ferns. Shakespeare, as we have said before, was 
not a botanist, yet most of these classes were recog¬ 
nised by him. To begin with the highest, the ferns, 
we read : 
Gads. We have the receipt of fern-seed, we walk invisible. 
Cham. Nay, by my faith, I think yon are more beholden to 
the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible. 
1 Henry 77 ., II. i. 95. 
The power of invisibility conferred by “fern-seed” 
sprang from the common belief that plants revealed 
by their size or some striking feature the diseases 
they were created to cure ; and in this case, since no 
one could detect the seed or methods of reproduction, 
an idea gained ground that it conferred invisibility. 
It is not probable that any special species was meant, 
but it has been assumed that it was the royal fern 
(<Osmunda regalis , L.), which received its generic name 
from the Scandinavian god Thor. The order Os- 
mundece have the spores collected on a fertile frond, 
which varies in shape from the barren one. It is a 
magnificent plant in its native haunts—marshy 
woods, etc.—reaching from 2 to 10 feet. A miser¬ 
able, weak plant, starved from drought, grows in the 
Birthplace Garden at Stratford, where it is labelled 
“ Fernseed.” It is not at all likely that this fern 
was known to Shakespeare. 
