September, 1918 
FOREST AND STREAM 
527 
The true fern, for all its delicacy of struc¬ 
ture, keeps perfectly for months 
smallest Fern must be as long as this 
card (9 inches). Your Ferns will be sorted 
and all those not 12 inches in length will 
be thrown out.” 
From this will be learnt that a fern pick¬ 
er’s job is not exactly play. More, fern 
gatherers must work very hard to make 
good, for their time is short, lasting barely 
three months, or until the first fall of 
snow, which in these mountainous regions 
often arrives before mid-October. 
Ferns are picked standing. Stooping to 
pick a fern is of itself a trifling affair, but 
the task becomes an arduous one, requir¬ 
ing patience and much physical endurance, 
when the act is repeated, not hundreds, 
but thousands of times during the day. 
All the same, fern picking is considered an 
excellent tonic for weak hearts. It also 
works marvels for the figures. If society 
women realized this fern picking with them 
would soon become a fad. Several cases 
are on record of wealthy doctors and law¬ 
yers, in search of a healthful outing, glee¬ 
fully pocketing a check representing a 
week’s earnings at the rate of $2 a day. 
The hardest part of fern picking is 
carrying the filled baskets from the woods. 
This is why the work is not popular with 
women, although the girls of the neigh¬ 
borhood sometimes earn pin-money by an 
afternoon’s work. 
The choicest ferns are supposed to grow 
among the hardwoods, as maples, birches, 
and beeches, and to reach them the fern 
picker must push his way into the track¬ 
less depths where lurk bears, bobcats, and 
the prickly hedgehog, force a passage 
through heavy undergrowths that scratch 
and tear, wade deep in slimy bogs, ford tur¬ 
bulent streams, and expose himself to the 
myriads of stinging insects with which the 
woods are filled. 
Ferns must be picked in the shade. Sun- 
kissed ferns, however beautiful, are of no 
use for packing. When ferns have been 
picked in certain woods for a space of 10 
years they grow small. These localities 
then are abandoned for several years. 
T HE fern pickers, carrying large bas¬ 
kets that hold about 6,000 ferns each, 
start out in the early morning. At 
noon they lay off an hour for dinner, then 
work again until six, or until too dark in 
the woods to see. The men usually work 
in pairs, for protection as well as com¬ 
panionship, for it is easy to lose one’s way 
in the Vermont woods, and in case of 
spending a night among them, two are safer 
than one. But there are venturesome pick¬ 
ers who fancy they can do better working 
without a companion. 
“We had a young Polak,” the landlady 
said, “who would go off by himself the 
very day of his arrival. He carried a ball 
of white twine which he twisted about the 
bushes as he advanced, but when he tried 
to come back he discovered that a cow fol¬ 
lowing his trail had chewed up the twine 
with the bushes. The Polak went off no 
more on tramps by himself after that.” 
Each picker carefully selects what he 
calls his patch, which he guards as jeal¬ 
ously as a miner his gold. “The men talk 
patches and quarrel about patches until 
I’m sick of the word patches,” the land¬ 
lady somewhat tartly observed. 
Moss in which to pack the ferns must be 
gathered before the pickers arrive 
No lovelier sight can be imagined than 
one of these fern patches in the Vermont 
woods, as in lacy luxuriance of tenderest 
green, they spread themselves out evenly 
flat as a table as far as the eye can reach. 
And where touched by the sunlight glint¬ 
ing through the interlaced branches of 
cypress and alder, it is like a vision of 
fairyland. In a patch of this kind the 
picker can strip for hours, scarcely moving 
from his place, and bring in a harvest that 
richly repays. 
But the fern picker must do more than 
just gather. To be paid for, ferns have 
to be counted, and for convenience of this, 
every 25 leaves must be firmly corded to¬ 
gether. Lucky the man who has women¬ 
folks in camp to bind for him and so save 
him the time that literally means money. 
The picker upon his return at nightfall 
carries his fern laden basket to the pack¬ 
inghouse, where his bunches are counted 
by the manager, who keeps tab of the 
amount, to be settled upon the arrival of 
the superintendent at the week end. 
“It must be easy to cheat,” I observed to 
the landlady who told me this. 
“Not so easy as you think,” she replied. t 
“The boss is an expert and he can tell by 
merely lifting a bund; in his hand whether 
it is up to the standard or not.’’ 
“Some do try to cheat,” she admitted. 
“The first time they have to pay a forfeit; 
the second time they are fired. So they 
all learn soon enough that there’s nothing 
in cheating.” 
After the day’s accumulation of ferns is 
counted, they are carefully packed In large 
wooden boxes. These boxes are lined with 
moss gathered by the moss gatherers who 
arrive at the fern fields a week ahead of 
the others to be in readiness for this emerg¬ 
ency. Each day big teams carry the crated 
ferns to the railway station whence they 
are shipped to the various centers, where 
they are placed in cold storage while await¬ 
ing delivery to the florists. 
Orders for the Green Mountain ferns 
comes from as far west as Denver from 
the wholesale florists. About one million 
ferns a week are shipped. Easter week 
this increases to half a million more. 
‘There’s big money in this fern busi¬ 
ness,” the landlady informed me, as after 
a peep in the rude shack known as packing¬ 
house, we slowly climbed the gentle slope 
of hillside together. “Why, the man who 
leases this mountain when he started fifteen 
years ago was a poor jobman traveling 
about the country with a gasoline engine 
chopping wood. He had once been a fern 
picker, so he started gathering ferns for 
himself and gradually he built up a large 
business. Now he lives in a twenty-five 
thousand dollar house and his wife has a 
regiment of servants and is so proud she 
won’t speak to her neighbors. 
“Ferns are sold to the trade anywhere 
from $1.25 to $2.50 a thousand,” was the 
landlady’s concluding remark. “Last year 
the gangs scattered over this mountain 
gathered in 37 millions—and left as many 
behind. So you may guess there is money 
in the fern business for somebody.” 
The man who has built up the fern busi¬ 
ness; below, a group of fern pickers com¬ 
prising a theological student, a doctor’s 
son and a prospective lawyer 
