Plants - Ferns, Palms and Cycads

By William Watson

This volume contains a comprehensive guide to ferns, palms, and cycads, and includes information on variations, descriptions, popularity, and other information of note. This text will be of considerable utility to gardeners and amateur botanists with an interest in these types of plants, and it would make for a worthy addition to collections of allied literature. The chapters of this book include: 'Ferns', 'Stove and Greenhouse Ferns', 'Hardy Ferns', 'Selaginellas', 'Lycopodiums', 'Palms', 'Insect Pests', 'List of Palms', 'Cycads', etcetera. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly hard-to-come-by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern edition - complete with a specially commissioned biography of William Watson.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Read Books Ltd.
• Release date: Mar 6, 2013
• ISBN: 9781447489276

Book preview

Fig. 201.—View in Tropical Fern House, Kew

FERNS

From the point of view of decorative foliage plants, the great family of Ferns is one of the main contributors to the immense amount of material which we nowadays possess. In the extraordinary diversity of form, size, habit of growth, simplicity or complexity of make and even in some cases range of colour, no class of plants equals the Ferns, not only in their marvellous specific diversity, but still more in the further diversity which has been developed by the peculiar mutational capacity of many of their species. Of this capacity the selective cultivator has taken advantage to the great enhancement of their characters, by obtaining through their spores, offspring which vary both ways, some reverting more or less towards the ancestral form, while others present new characters. Hence in many cases the results of selective propagation are frequently so different from the normal, that no one ignorant of their pedigree would credit their origin.

It will be of interest to dwell a little upon the history of Ferns. They are the undoubted progenitors of all flowering plants, while they themselves have been evolved from primarily lower forms of spore-bearing vegetation, such as the seaweeds and algæ, which under persistent aqueous conditions of existence have survived in innumerable forms. There is no branch of palæological study which gives us so appalling an idea of the immensity of time involved in the evolution of life from the very beginning as that of the fossil plants. With the animal world we can trace a distinct progression from one geological age to another, and, when we compare the earliest forms of animal life we know of with those of to-day, we find an enormous difference, so great indeed that we are probably safe in asserting that no form of animal life at present existing could be for a moment mistaken for one existing at the time of the earliest known geological deposits in which any animal life is visible at all.

With Ferns the extraordinary fact is clearly demonstrated by myriads of examples, that, though they form the chief material of the coal measures, they were then apparently quite as far advanced in the evolutional scale as those of the present age, from which it needs a keen eye in many instances to detect a difference, and that, when detected, will be no greater than now exists between the species themselves. Beyond the Ferns and their allies of the coal forming period, when they must have constituted the great bulk of terrestrial vegetation, we cannot penetrate; but, judging by the imperceptible alteration evolved in the subsequent period, it is impossible to form an idea of the length of the previous period required to transform a seaweed from a water plant into a beautifully cut fern adapted for scattering its spores through the air on dry land. On the other hand, the link between Ferns and Seaweeds is maintained in the fact that complete submersion of the reproductive apparatus in water is absolutely essential.

Cycads show a sort of half-way transformation from Ferns to Flowering Plants in their frond-like foliage and certain peculiarities in their reproductive characters. Gingko biloba, the Maidenhair Tree, one of our rare Conifers, is, however, perhaps the most marked existing link remaining. Although a true Conifer or Pine tree, attaining a huge size, its leaves are constructed on exactly the lines of a Fern. Fertilization is effected by a travelling spermatozoid instead of the male germ being carried all the way by a pollen tube. The immense range of the coal fields which exist in many parts of the world represents what we may term primeval Fern forests of great area and of often immense duration. These were, however, subjected to changes of level