We do not treat our native ferns with sufficient respect.  Homage is paid in literature to the palm, and it is an emblem of honour, but our New England ferns, many of them equally majestic, are tossed into heaps for hay and mown down by the ruthless scythe of the farmer every autumn when he shows his greatest agricultural energy by stripping the waysides of their beauty prior to the coming of the roadmender with his awful “turn-piking” process.  If, by the way, the automobilists succeed in stopping this piking practice, we will print a nice little prayer for them and send it to Saint Peter, so that, though it won’t help them in this world,—­that would be dangerous,—­it will by and by!

In the woods the farmer allows the ferns to stand, for are they not one of the usual attributes of a picnic?  Stuck in the horses’ bridle, they keep off flies; they serve to deck the tablecloth upon which the food is spread; gathered in armfuls, they somewhat ease the contact of the rheumatic with the rocks, upon which they must often sit on such occasions.  They provide the young folks with a motive to seek something further in the woods, and give the acquisitive ladies who “press things” much loot to take home, and all without cost.

This may not be respectful treatment, but it is not martyrdom; the fern is a generous plant, a thing of wiry root-stock and prehistoric tenacity; it has not forgotten that tree ferns are among its ancestors; when it is discouraged, it rests and grows again.  But imagine the feelings of a mat of exquisite maidenhair rent from a shady slope with moss and partridge vine at its feet, and quivering elusive woodland shade above, on finding itself unceremoniously crowded into a bed, between cannas or red geraniums!  Or fancy the despair of either of the wide-spreading Osmundas, lovers of stream borders opulent with leaf-mould, or wood hollows deep with moist richness, on finding themselves ranged in a row about the porch of a summer cottage, each one tied firmly to a stake like so many green parasols stuck in the dry loam point downward!

It is not so much a question of how many species of native ferns can be domesticated, for given sufficient time and patience all things are possible, but how many varieties are either decorative, interesting, or useful away from their native haunts.  For any one taking what may be called a botanical interest in ferns, a semi-artificial rockery, with one end in wet ground and the other reaching dry-wood conditions, is extremely interesting.  In such a place, by obtaining some of the earth with each specimen and tagging it carefully, an out-of-door herbarium may be formed and something added to it every time an excursion is made into a new region.  Otherwise the ferns that are worth the trouble of transplanting and supplying with soil akin to that from which they came, are comparatively few.  Of decorative species the Osmundas easily lead; being natives of swampy or at least moist ground, they should have a like situation, and yet so strong are their roots and crown of leaves that they will flourish for years after the moisture that has fed them has been drained and the shading overgrowth cut away, even though dwarfed in growth and coarsened in texture.  Thus people seeing them growing under these conditions in open fields and roadside banks mistake their necessities.