This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 Excerpt: ...sterile fronds were very rare. Growing from the broken rocks in among the Purple Cliff Brake were thrifty little tufts of the Maidenhair Spleenwort. This tiny plant seemed to have forgotten its shyness and to have forsworn its love for moist, shaded, mossy rocks. t ventured boldly out upon these barren cliffs, exposing ...
Read More
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1902 Excerpt: ...sterile fronds were very rare. Growing from the broken rocks in among the Purple Cliff Brake were thrifty little tufts of the Maidenhair Spleenwort. This tiny plant seemed to have forgotten its shyness and to have forsworn its love for moist, shaded, mossy rocks. t ventured boldly out upon these barren cliffs, exposing itself to the fierce glare of the sun and to every blast of wind, and holding itself upright with a saucy selfassurance that seemed strangely at variance with its nature. Near by a single patch of the Walking Leaf climbed up the face of the cliff, while, perhaps strangest of all, from the decaying trunk of a tree, which lay prostrate among the rocks, sprang a single small but perfect plant of the Ebony Spleenwort, a fern which was a complete stranger in this locality, so far as I could Puipi/cim Brake learn. YET DIFFERING NOTICEABLY FROM STERILE FRONDS 17. CHRISTMAS FERN Aspidium acrostichoides (Dryopteris acrostichoides) New Brunswick to Florida, in rocky woods. One to two and a half feet high, with very chaffy stalks. Fronds.--Lance-shaped, once-pinnate, fertile fronds contracted toward the summit; pinna narrowly lance-shaped, half halberdshaped at the slightly stalked base, bristly-toothed, the upper ones on the fertile fronds contracted and smaller; fruit-dots round, close, confluent with age, nearly covering the under surface of the fertile pinnae; indusium orbicular, fixed by the depressed centre. Of our evergreen ferns this is the best fitted to serve as a decoration in winter. No other fern has such deep-green, highly polished fronds. They need only a mixture of red berries to become a close rival to the holly at Christmastime. Wrapped in a garment early in the spring. When we go to the woods in April to look for arbutus, or to listen...
Read Less