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Besides those common to England, the Pteris cretica grows luxuriantly in the damp ravines, as well as that most beautiful of European ferns, the Woodwardia radicans, whose fronds are often more than six feet long.
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.
Many fine ferns dwell here also, especially the beautiful and interesting rock-ferns pellaea, and cheilanthes of several species fringing and rosetting dry rock-piles and ledges; woodwardia and asplenium on damp spots with fronds six or seven feet high; the delicate maiden-hair in mossy nooks by the falls, and the sturdy, broad-shouldered pteris covering nearly all the dry ground beneath the oaks and pines.
Woodwardia radicans is a superb, broad-shouldered fern five to eight feet high, growing in vase-shaped clumps where tile ground is nearly level and on some of the benches of the north wall of the Valley where it is watered by a broad trickling stream. It thatches the sloping rocks, frond overlapping frond like roof shingles.
Between the huge brown boles of the redwoods woodwardia grew riotously, while through the great branches of these sentinels of the ages the sunlight filtered. Against the prevailing twilight of the surrounding forest it descended like a halo, and where it struck the ground John Cardigan paused. "McTavish," he said, "she died this morning."
Beneath the cool, deep shade of these majestic trees the ground is occupied by ferns, chiefly woodwardia and aspidiums, with only a few flowering plants oxalis, trientalis, erythronium, fritillaria, smilax, and other shade-lovers.
They have been described by Sir Charles Bunbury and Professor Heer, and the former first pointed out that many of the leaves are of the laurel type, and analogous to those now flourishing in the modern forests of Madeira. He also recognised among them the leaves of Woodwardia radicans, and Davallia Canariensis, ferns now abundant in Madeira.
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.
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