Temple of the Winds

One definite highlight of the Melbourne Royal Botanic Gardens (see previous post) was stumbling upon this fern-festooned temple in an out-of-the-way corner of the property. As the sign says, this is the Temple of the Winds, and it is adorned with native staghorn ferns. Pretty neat!

Ferns and Charles R. Knight

Hello all! The long, cold Wisconsin winter appears to be drawing to a close, which means spring, flowers, and ferns can't be far off. This past week was spring break for my university, so an escape to regions southward seemed in order. We made it as far as Chicago. This was the first time in four years of living three hours away that my husband and I have made it to the Windy City, and we had a great time. One of the highlights was definitely the Field Museum, which I've had a goal of visiting for years. Sue was wonderful, but our favorite exhibit ended up being Evolving Planet, a huge stretch of space that wanders through nearly a quarter of the upper floor of the museum, and leads you through the evolution of life on earth starting hundreds of millions of years ago. One of my favorite parts of the exhibit was a large and beautiful mural above a stretch of display cases showing ancient fossil plants, mostly lycophytes and some ferns. Here's the mural:

You may or may not be able to make out, in the bottom lefthand corner, the author's signature: Chas. R. Knight. I was admiring all the lovely tree ferns and horsetails when my husband pointed this out to me, and I was thrilled! The museum I used to work at in Ithaca, NY did a big exhibit on Knight while I was there, and his prehistoric art is phenomenal. He is perhaps singlehandedly responsible for shaping our collective vision about the prehistoric world. No other artist before him had painted as prolifically, vividly, and accurately the earth's long extinct inhabitants. Jurassic Park wouldn't have been nearly as exciting and mesmerizing if Knight hadn't implanted a fascination for prehistory in our collective unconscious. I've seen several of his smaller pieces, but it turns out that in the 1920s he was commissioned by the Field Museum to paint 20-something of these huge murals for their new fossil halls, which became the Evolving Planet exhibit that we enjoyed the other day. His murals are all gorgeous, and they add a depth to the fossils on display that allows you to picture these plants and animals still alive and roaming their native habitats. You can learn more about Knight and his work for the Field Museum here. And here are some close-ups of the ferns that first caught my attention:

Fern Rap

Several of my fellow TAs in the Botany Department are teaching Introductory Biology this semester, a giant, 1,000-student mega-class. One of the professors offered the students the opportunity to write a song to get extra credit... and one of the results is an absolutely phenomenal effort by a group of these students. My fellow grads let me know about it, for soon-to-be-obvious reasons, and the professor gave me the audio file and permission to post it here. I hope you'll join me in appreciation of these students' efforts and their scientifically accurate (but for a tiny detail or two) composition putting the fern life cycle to song. I (well actually they) give you the Fern Rap.

For your reading/following-along pleasure, here arethe lyrics:

I’m a fern in the world, just trying to grow

Fertilization and cell division is all that I know

I just want to survive and spread my spores

And know I’m not a peach but my life is hard core

They say I’m a monilophyte but you can call me a fern

My life’s been a long one, with many twists and turns

Sometimes it’s hard to discern what stage I’m in

Let me welcome you to my world, let the story begin

I started out as a spore, on the bottom of a leaf

Grew up in a sporophyte, my release was a relief

I had many brothers and sisters, and some of them didn’t make it

But sometimes life is hard, and the goal is just to stay fit

I was a small little guy, all alone and homeless

But I soon started to grow I guess you could say mitosis

And pretty soon fertilization became my focus

But I knew finding a mate for me was pretty much hopeless

I’m a fern in the world, just trying to grow

Fertilization and cell division is all that I know

I just want to survive and spread my spores

And know I’m not a peach but my life is hard core

So I fertilized myself just not to remain childless

I really didn’t care that all my kids would be homozygous

It really wasn’t hard there was no pandemonium

I just put sperm from my antheridia into my archegonium

So now I was a zygote, yeah from 1N to two

The best years of my life, and upwards I grew

The increase in my size was all in my genetics

And it also didn’t hurt that I was photosynthetic

I grew and I grew and it seemed like overnight

I reached my final stage and became a sporophyte

So now I’m making sporangium all on my own

And just hoping my little spores, will all find a home

Fern blog La Selva

I just found this blog about ferns at La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica. La Selva is one of the stations operated by the Organization for Tropical Studies, which ran a tropical fern course I took several years ago, part of which was taught at La Selva. It's a really neat place in the lowland tropical rainforest of northern Costa Rica, with lots of ferns. This video-blog documents research that's being done on the La Selva ferns, some of it by students, and it's really great!

Here's their most recent post, on Lomariopsidaceae. Go visit the blog to learn more!

Fiddleheads immortal

One of the nicest things about living in Madison, Wisconsin is that we have a lovely, free, public botanical garden here, Olbrich Botanical Gardens. And one of the nicest things about the Garden is that, in addition to having many ferns on the grounds, they have this beautiful cement statue of fiddleheads prominently displayed! I was stunned the first time I saw it, and now it's one of my favorite things to visit in town. I don't know anything about who designed or made it, because I haven't been able to locate a plaque or sign. It's now become a mission to find out the name of the artist who appreciates ferns this much.

Update, March 2010: A former student of mine discovered the identity of the sculptor: her name is Sylvia U. Beckman. Thanks Lois!

Interrupted Fern

The snow is starting to melt in Wisconsin, so I'm looking forward to the arrival of spring and a return to regular blog posting. I saw this posted on a friend's Facebook profile the other day and wanted to share it: an amusing comic about Interrupted Fern (a.k.a. Osmunda claytoniana). Of course, it really gets its name from the fertile pinnae that "interrupt" the sterile green pinnae along the rachis (see below). But the comic (drawn by Rosemary Mosco of birdandmoon) is a good interpretation, too. 

Samambaia

The Portuguese word samambaia translates as fern. Apparently there is a particular fern found in the rainforests of Brazil that is traditionally known as samambaia, and a powder derived from it is used for its therapeutic properties to treat an abundance of conditions ranging from bronchitis to Alzheimer's. You can see a complete list at this site, though I have to recommend against purchasing the powder in favor of seeking modern medical advice if you have any of those ailments. It appears from the pictures I've found at that site and others that samambaia is a species of Phlebodium (which is not the same as Polypodium, despite what the linked site claims).

Whatever its scientific identity, samambaia has prompted more than medical miracles: in 2003 cellist Yo-Yo Ma released the album Obrigado Brazil, which contains a track entitled Samambaia. The piece was inspired by, you guessed it: the Brazilian rainforest ferns he encountered while in the country. 

You can hear this lovely piece of music for free, and read an NPR Morning Edition interview with Yo-Yo about the album and its inspiration at NPR's site. 

Ferns on the Mall

Greetings! It's been a long time since my last post. My work at the Smithsonian has kept me really busy, but we're making progress! Unfortunately I haven't done any ferning or field-tripping since I've been here, so I have no new pictures of ferns in the wild, but I did come across some ferns in a most unexpected place: the National Mall. I happened to look up from my book one morning while on the shuttle, and there, right in front of the Smithsonian Castle, where these benches! They looked really familiar, and sure enough, they are replicas of the 1870 Fern and Blackberry garden seat I wrote about several months ago. There's actually a website that discusses the various outdoor furnishings in the Smithsonian gardens, but alas, it doesn't mention these benches explicitly, only citing them as illustrative of the "naturalistic" period of furnishings. I'll have to make up my own story about how they were chosen (involving some clear-eyed visionary who recognized the beauty, modesty, and steadfastness of ferns and felt that they were a perfect symbol to sit before a great repository of knowledge).

I'm afraid I won't have many more opportunities for fern-viewing until late July, when I go to Vancouver, B.C., Washington State, and Oregon, for the annual Botanical Society of America conference and some time in the field. The blog will likely be light until then, as I wrap up this stint in D.C. and head home to Madison. I should have a lot to write about once that next trip begins!

UW-Madison Arboretum

This morning I led a fern walk for guides at the UW-Madison Arboretum, a fantastic place located in the heart of Madison and close to the campus. It is a collection of managed forest, wetland, and grassland community types, and one of my favorite places in the city. We had a fun time walking and looking for ferns, despite the hordes of mosquitos that descend as soon as you set foot in the woods. We found, among other things, a thriving patch of the fern pictured above, Onoclea sensibilis (Sensitive Fern), although its fertile fronds (right photo) weren't out yet in the Arb. Other ferns encountered included Dryopteris goldiana and D. intermedia (Goldie's and Intermediate Ferns), Osmunda regalis (Royal Fern), and lots of Athyrium filix-femina (Lady Fern) and Matteuccia struthiopteris (Ostrich Fern). Things are very lush at this time of year, and most of the ferns we saw were very happy! I hope to do more walks like this in the future.

Fern Pots

A short post tonight is all I can manage, as we're watching Blue Planet; the beautiful footage is just too enthralling and distracting! In the category of fern-inspired, and an add-on to my Fern Craze post, are these ferny pots. Or, more accurately, these "Salopian Art Pottery" vases. I don't know much about them, except that they date from roughly 1880-1910, and their creation was clearly inspired by the delicate fronds that decorate them.

Fern Craze

You may or may not have heard of the "Victorian Fern Craze," a time when ferns, fern gardens, and fern decorations were very popular throughout Great Britain. If you haven't heard of it, you're missing one of the more eccentric fixations of those wacky Victorians, and that's coming from a fern lover. Between roughly 1830 and 1890, the passion for ferns (or 'pteridomania' as it came to be known) reached its peak in England and Scotland, where gentlepeople arranged outings to collect ferns, which they then stored in ornate glass terrariums. These in- and outdoor fern gardens served as the inspiration for many ferny items, including the 'Fern and Blackberry' cast iron garden seat pictured above, manufactured by the English Coalbrookdale Company  around 1870. I wouldn't mind something like that for my garden...

The top-left image, Gathering Ferns, is from the Illustrated London News, July 1, 1871, and the bell-cover at top-right is from the 1856 Rustic Adornments for Homes of Taste.

Mauchline Fernware

In the category of fern-inspired, I found a site about these interesting items which were manufactured in Mauchline, Scotland from roughly 1830 to 1930. The town generated a whole range of these wooden souvenir and home items, and one of their lines was called "Fern Ware." The name says it all. Above are pictures of some of the more interestingly-decorated items.

Ferny fiddle

  

While perusing the brochures and postcards advertising various local events at a bookstore this weekend, one card in particular caught my eye. It pictured several violins, each of which had been decorated by a local artist, and which are being raffled off to benefit the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra. The project is called Art of Note. What drew my attention was the sight of fiddleheads adorning one of the fiddles! This violin was painted by Wisconsin native Cynthia Quinn, a painter and gardner, who covered the instrument in the Royal Fern, Osmunda regalis. There are fiddleheads on the front and mature fronds on the back, as well as a few frogs woven in. All flora and fauna pictured on the violin are native to Wisconsin. Click on the images for larger versions of her beautiful, fern-inspired work.