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Many a fine, hanging-garden aloft on breezy inaccessible heights owes to it its freshness and fullness of beauty; ferneries in shady nooks, filled with Adiantum, Woodwardia, Woodsia, Aspidium, Pellaea, and Cheilanthes, rosetted and tufted and ranged in lines, daintily overlapping, thatching the stupendous cliffs with softest beauty, some of the delicate fronds seeming to float on the warm moist air, without any connection with rock or stream.
I may also mention a large mertensia, a fine anemone, a veratrum, six feet high, a large blue daisy, growing up to three to four thousand feet, and at the summit a dwarf species, with dusky, hairy involucres, and a few ferns, aspidium, gymnogramma, and small rock cheilanthes, leaving scarce a foot of ground bare, though the mountain looks bald and brown in the distance like those of the desert ranges of the Great Basin in Utah and Nevada.
The editor of "Loudon's Magazine," in a paragraph appended to this article, says: "We have examined the Wrens' nests sent; their staple materials are moss, feathers, and hair. Into the moss on the exterior of the nest are woven a more or less perfect but feeble frond or two, and separate pinnae as well of Aspidium Filix-Mas, and leaves of apple, elm, and oak trees.
About the edge were various other species, notably Aspidium Goldianum, which I here found for the first time, and Aspidium aculeatum, var. Braunii. All in all, it was a curious and pretty sight, this tiny tarn filled with ferns instead of water, one worth going a good distance to see, and sure to attract the notice of the least observant traveler. Ferns are mostly of a gregarious habit.
There are a great many interesting ferns in the Valley and about it. Naturally enough the greater number are rock ferns pellaea, cheilanthes, polypodium, adiantum, woodsia, cryptogramma, etc., with small tufted fronds, lining cool glens and fringing the seams of the cliffs. The most important of the larger species are woodwardia, aspidium, asplenium, and, above all, the common pteris.
I brought to Europe some powders with metallic lustre, taken from very old trunks of Meniscium and Aspidium. In proportion as we descended the mountain of Santa Maria, we saw the arborescent ferns diminish, and the number of palm-trees increase. Everything denoted our approach to the coast, and to a zone in which the mean temperature of the day is from 28 to 30 degrees.
The leaves are an ingredient in the pulvis sternutatoris of the shops. ASPIDIUM Filix-Mas. Polypodium, Linn. MALE FERN. The Roots. L. E. D. They are said to be aperient and anthelmintic. Simon Pauli tells us, that they have been the grand secret of some empirics against the broad kind of worms called taenia; and that the dose is one, two, or three drams of the powder.
One evening she sat studying ferns, and heroically saying over and over, "Andiantum, Aspidium, and Asplenium, Trichomanes," while longing to go and talk delightfully to David, who sat musing by the fire. "I can't go on so much longer," she thought despairingly.
Ruiz and Pavon, comes from the Aspidium coriaceum, Willd. These palms with pinnated and thorny leaves formed a pleasing contrast to the fern-trees. One of the latter, the Cyathea speciosa,* grows to the height of more than thirty-five feet, a prodigious size for plants of this family. The trunk alone is from 22 to 24 feet long.
This fern is eaten abundantly by the New Zealanders: its distribution is most remarkable, being found very rarely indeed in Europe, and in Norway only. Ferns are more commonly used for food than is supposed. In Calcutta the Hindoos boil young tops of a Polypodium with their shrimp curries; and both in Sikkim and Nepal the watery tubers of an Aspidium are abundantly eaten.
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