Excerpt from British Ferns and Their Varieties

This difference of yield at home and that abroad, and one which our own experience abroad tends to support to some extent, is that it is largely due to the fact that for more than half a century a continued coterie of gentlemen and some ladies, stimulated at the outset by successes in the first half of the nineteenth century, have made here a hobby of searching for abnormal forms among the common Ferns, while some of them have devoted themselves not only to such search and subsequent selective cultivation through the spores so obtained, but also to keeping up clear records of the discoveries, and even depicting them by nature prints. In this connection it is due to the labours of the late Colonel Jones, of Clifton, who prepared some 300 beautifully executed prints from the fronds themselves, that with the kind permission of his daughter, Miss Jones, we are enabled to enrich this volume by a selection, as an appendix, of about a hundred of the most striking forms, adhering almost entirely to the wild finds. The value of this selection is enhanced by the addition of Colonel Jones's contemporary notes, which will be of extreme interest to all students of our indigenous plants. It will need but a glance through these to appreciate the inventive power of Nature and the diversity of form which one and the same Species is capable of assuming at her magical touch. Why this should happen is utterly unknown to us. Theories have been put forward that sports indicate a sympathetic response to environmental influences, but no observant Fern-hunter can agree to this, as the widest variations may be, and often are, found associated with the common forms, their roots and fronds intermingling, so that the environment is identical. Widely different forms, dwarf and congested, robust and lax, may be found on the same hillside, with the same aspect, soil, and general environment, so that the inducing cause of the change must be sought elsewhere, and so far has entirely baffled research. It is clear, too, from the character of such environments, that the sports cannot possibly be imputed to any Change of conditions, another untenable theory. The theory, too, that the number of wild finds may be partly due to escaped spores from the collections dotted about the country must also be rejected, since not only have the great majority been found in localities far distant from such collections, but as a rule there are individual distinctions in wild sports which differen tiate them from each other, and therefore from the progeny of the collected plants. In one instance, in the writer's experience, he visited a wood in the Lake District in which spores from a collection had been artificially introduced several varieties were discovered, but all were distinctly referable to known forms in cultivation, which is practically never the case with wild finds. Spores, too, despite their minuteness, are solid, heavy bodies, unlike the much minuter, ubiquitous ones of the fungi. Hence they are little likely to travel far afield, and so mislead the hunter.

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