Gardening Everlasting Ferns

The joys and adventures of growing ferns are countless. Being perennial they return year after year. Many ferns thrive in dense shade where few other plants will live. Some are evergreen. Most are easy to grow, requiring literally no care and upkeep. Ferns multiply rapidly, remain lovely all summer, seldom are seriously bothered by insects or diseases. The appeal of a fern lies in the exquisite beauty of its form, texture, and its various shades of subtle foliage color. Incidentally where you have ferns you will also have birds: the furry down that covers the young fern fronds makes ideal nesting material.

If you have but three trees and a little shade, ferns will convert this to a real woods setting, small in scale perhaps, but genuine in feel and atmosphere. Whatever small wooded area they grace, ferns seem to enlarge it. They even bring the feel of woods where no woods exist at all, as when planted on the north side of a wall, in the lea of a building, or in any protected shady place.

What's more, you can dig almost any fern you need from the wild; few species are on conservation lists. (Check first, just to be sure.)

Ferns are fillers for bulb plantings in a shady or semi-shady area. They can be a fine and significant feature of your basic landscape design. Also they hold the soil in place along the banks of streams, ponds, lakes, or on any shady or sunny slope.

You can even eat ferns in their early growth; cut and cook them like asparagus, swimming in butter. Each year in the dead of winter I resolve to try this. But when spring arrives I never have the heart to disturb them with knife and cooking pot.

Whether you eat them or look at them, ferns are well worth keeping track of in the spring. However, even if none of these delights and adventures existed, there is still this one reason why ferns are a must for somewhere in your outdoors: the utter and irresistible appeal of their new fronds uncurling out of last year's dead crown. There on the leafy woods floor you watch the golden-brown furry frond reach up and give itself to spring. In its very unfurling is a kind of yielding, a yielding to the new season.

To help you get to know the ferns, here's a brief description of their "anatomy." A fern frond consists of "leaves," stem and all. A pinna (plural: pinnae) is a single "leaf" on this stem. A pinnule is one of the divisions of this "leaf." In other words, a pinnule is a small segment of the pinna which is part of the frond. A sporophyll is a spore-bearing frond. The spores (fruit) are the little brown dots or "seeds" often noted on the undersides of the pinnae. A spore-bearing frond is called a sporophyll. The sporophyll may be similar to the sterile fronds or, as in the cinnamon fern and a number of others, quite differently designed.

Ferns increase and spread naturally by spores and underground runners. You can also propagate them by dividing the clumps.