526 ' FOREST AND STREAM SEPTEMBER, 1918 
FERN PICKING AS A VACATION PASTIME 
IN SOMBRE FORESTS OF THE GREEN MOUNTAINS MANY STUDENTS FIND GATHER¬ 
ING WILD FERNS FOR FLORISTS A HEALTHFUL AND LUCRATIVE OCCUPATION 
I N mid-August they come—the fern gath¬ 
erers—a motley crew of 60 men, trail¬ 
ing up the steep grade that leads from 
the tiny post-office hamlet to the deserted 
lumber camp standing at the foot of one 
of Vermont’s great mountains, in the som¬ 
bre depths of whose huge forests the best 
ferns grow. 
A deserted lumber camp is a fearfully 
impressive thing. Among the pine-clad 
slopes of the mountain, along the swirling 
brink of the torrent, on the rocky edge of 
the roadside, sunk in the lushness of un¬ 
ploughed meadowland, totter the time- 
silvered ruins of sawmill, schoolhouse, 
cabin, and store, while over all brood the 
awesome ghosts of silence and desolation. 
But the fern pickers know how to make 
themselves comfortable. Some pitch tents 
among the odorous pines; those who have 
brought wife and children hurry to extract 
habitable quarters from out the wreckage, 
while those of pretention who have the 
price, install themselves in the homey 
boardinghouse run for the accommodation 
of sportsmen up from the city to hunt or 
to fish for speckled trout. 
And here their Highnesses fare royally 
each day on home-cured ham, eggs fresh 
from the nest, trout popped from brooklet 
into frying pan, pies of wild berries picked 
by the brown fingers of the pretty daugh¬ 
ters of the house, and cookies the secret 
of whose succulence is known only to the 
hospitable landlady of the sportsmen’s inn. 
Vermonters everywhere, and especially 
those of the mountains, are famed for gen¬ 
tleness of breeding and courtesy of man¬ 
ner, and none more markedly possessed 
these attractive characteristics than did the 
good lady who provided for the guests of 
the inn pitched in the heart of this old 
lumber camp far from the influences of 
what is termed modern civilization. 
By REBECCA MIDDLETON SAMPSON 
A LL sorts make up the fern pickers— 
Italians, Polaks, Canadians, both 
French and English, and Americans 
from every State. Among the lowly ones, 
working shoulder to shoulder, and consort¬ 
ing with them as mates, are to be found 
students wishful ^o earn money to carry 
them through college, the black sheep of 
wealthy families, and the occasional in¬ 
congruity of a thrifty tramp making hay 
while the sun shone. 
In the lot that I happened to meet was 
a young theological aspirant lifting the 
burden of his education from the shoul¬ 
ders of an elderly father, a physician’s 
son under the spell of wanderlust, a bank 
president’s heir out on bail for some crime 
that made him ashamed or afraid to go 
home, an orator in hard luck, a baker, a 
butcher, a machinist out of jobs, a farmer 
with his two sons working to pay off the 
farm mortgage, and an acrobat for many 
rears connected with a famous circus, and 
who, by the way, was a marvellous dancer. 
A jolly crowd they were, these fern pick¬ 
ers in the old lumber camp among the Ver¬ 
mont mountains, and work done, merry 
evenings they had together playing cards, 
telling jokes, and wrestling in good-natured 
combat. Sometimes the college students 
would sing beautiful glees, or the acrobat 
do intricate turns. The embryo preacher 
made valiant attempts to work off im¬ 
promptu sermons, but the husky orator 
with his jibes was more of a favorite. 
Fern gathering is a business of import 
little suspected by those who know the 
fern only as the ornamental appendage of 
funerals, weddings, and the flowers that 
bloom on the breast of fair women. 
Many gangs of sixty are scattered over 
the big mountain which is leased from the 
wealthy lumber company that owns it, by 
the man whose business it is to supply 
ferns to the great florist trade of the coun¬ 
try'. This mountain is leased for five years 
at a time at the rate of $100 a year. Think i 
of a mountain with an area of fifty-six 
thousand acres renting for $100 a year! 
One of the keenest regrets of the inn land¬ 
lady was that she had not rented this moun¬ 
tain herself and made a neat turn by sub¬ 
letting it to the fern company. 
“I did think of it!” she wailed in answer 
to my reproachful query. “But, dear me, 
it did seem such an awful thing for me to 
tackle a mountain!” 
Each gang of pickers is in charge of a 
manager, and he is under a superintendent 
who once weekly appears (“in the biggest 
automobile ever seen in these parts,” the 
landlady proudly informed) to settle pay¬ 
ments and keep an eye on affairs. 
Forty cents a thousand is the usual price 
paid to a fern picker. An expert at this 
rate can make five dollars a day and one 
old man is still enviously spoken of who 
made six. Tradition also tells of the case 
of a certain picker who gathered 670 
bunches (25 to the bunch) in two consecu¬ 
tive days. Such records are rare. 
“Fern picking is not a bad business, espe¬ 
cially when the season is good,” the land¬ 
lady remarked. 
“What makes a good season?” I asked. 
“Plenty of snow,” was the reply. “An 
open winter is bad for ferns. The sun 
shrivels the roots. Fern roots need the 
nourishment and the protection of the 
snow in order to flourish.” 
F ERN gathering is not quite the simple 
matter it sounds. One, first of all, 
must learn to distinguish between the 
true fern (the lace fern they call it) and 
the bracken, which grows so profusely. 
To the uninitiated both look exactly alike. 
The real fern has tiny brown seeds on the 
underside and a light fuzz at the lower 
part of the stem. The bracken is coarser 
in texture, lighter in color, and so perish¬ 
able of quality as to be worthless. The 
true fern, for all its delicacy of structure, 
under proper conditions, keeps perfectly 
for many months. 
It is a calamity for a green hand to spend 
a day picking only to discover that his ac¬ 
cumulation of hard labor is rubbish to be 
thrown away. The inn landlady told me 
of once seeing a basket of 4,000 ferns 
dumped aside because not the real thing, 
and the poor Polak who had gathered them 
sat down and blubbered like a child. 
The leaf of the fern alone is gathered. 
The root, with one tiny curled protuber¬ 
ance, must be left for the production of 
the next year’s crop, and a notice, signed 
by {he superintendent, and tacked up in 
camp for all to see, reads: 
“No Ferns will be paid for under 12 
inches in length and these must be mixed 
with larger ones, 15, 18, and 20 inches, 
with 4-inch stems. The green part of the 
