The Ghost In the Garden by Jude Piesse

Author:Jude Piesse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO006000, BIO026000, BIO015000, PHI000000, SCI027000, SCI075000, HIS054000, SCI100000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2021-05-12T16:00:00+00:00

5

Ferns and Feathers

‘With respect to Ferns, I am so ignorant that I hardly know what to do,’ Darwin wrote to one of his many informal scientific collaborators in 1863. Despite the craze for ferns then sweeping the nation, Darwin apparently never did get to grips with the reproductive anomalies of the spore-bearing plants he knew to classify as ‘cryptogams’, from the Greek for hidden or secret marriage. He expressed similar feelings of defeat six years later when thanking the ex-patriate merchant and horticulturalist William Chester Tait for sending him specimens from Portugal, including the feather of a Laughing Dove that Tait believed was descended from a turtle dove rather than a rock pigeon, and the leaf of an unknown fern. Darwin may have understood pigeons more readily than ferns — he was quick to correct Tait on the feather, but ‘quite ignorant’ as to the identity of the leaf — but ferns and feathers do have points of affinity in other taxonomies. The Greeks called ferns ‘pteridons’, from their word for ‘feather’, ‘pteris’. For centuries, the plants provided shady haunts for fairy folk flitting just beyond the field of vision. Their complex system of reproduction via microscopic spores has long inspired folktales about the power of the fern’s ‘seed’ to bestow invisibility on anyone who can collect it. ‘If you pick the right sort of fern seed at just ten minutes of the right hour of the day, and wear it in your pocket you can walk invisible,’ read one of the popular stories reviving such legends in the 1860s. ‘What is more, if there are any fairies to be seen you will see them.’

Susan and Catherine certainly saw something in ferns that their famous brother did not. They grew them in the quiet years following Caroline’s marriage, Darwin’s transplantation of his garden experiments to Down, and their father’s death in 1848. The oldest ferns predate the oldest flowering plants by two hundred million years. The slightly more modern fern families that grew back in the late Cretaceous period seventy-five million years ago would have looked much like the ferns that grew at The Mount in the 1850s, and much the same as those that still grow on the bank today: queer and spectral, tall as wands; burning up through the air like green flames. Now, as then, the ferns on the riverbank glide in and out of sightlines between trees; looming with a self-sustaining green that needs no witness. They quiver very slightly with each change in the air, just as they would have in the sisters’ final decades — when the garden at The Mount was their domain, and everything seemed still.

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According to Susan Campbell’s research, Susan and Catherine planted a range of ferns including hart’s tongue, rue-leaved spleenwort, Osmunda regalis, and Polypodiums on the terrace wall and bank between 1852 and 1862. Ferns were also grown at The Mount beyond these dates. In August 1865, just a year before both Catherine and Susan died, a report of

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