Wednesday, October 16, 2024

A Book of the Seasons: The Evergreen Ferns, Aspidium spinulosum & Aspidium cristatum

 [Asplenium spinulosum (spinulose woodfern

Asplenium cristatum  (crested woodfern)]


I would make a chart of our life,
know why just this circle of creatures completes the world.
Henry Thoreau, April 18, 1852

I see two kinds of ferns still green and much in fruit,
apparently the Aspidium spinulosum (?) and cristatum (?) . . .
What virtue is theirs that enables them to resist the frost? 

Almost every plant, however humble, has thus its day,
and sooner or later becomes the characteristic feature
of some part of the landscape or other.
September 10, 1860


Aspidium spinulosum


September 30. Of the twenty-three ferns which I seem to know here, seven may be called evergreens September 30, 1859 

October 15. That appears to be Aspidium cristatum which I find evergreen in swamps, but no fertile fronds now . . .  It cannot be a described variety of spinulosum, for it is only once pinnate.  October 15, 1859


October 23. The ferns which I can see on the bank, apparently all evergreens, are polypody at rock, marginal shield fern, terminal shield fern, and (I think it is) Aspidium spinulosum, which I had not identified. Apparently Aspidium cristatum elsewhere . . . The above-named evergreen ferns are so much the more conspicuous on that pale-brown ground. They stand out all at once and are seen to be evergreen; their character appears. October 23, 1857 


October 28. I now begin to notice the evergreen ferns, when the others are all withered or fallen. October 28, 1858


October 31 In the Lee farm swamp, by the old Sam Barrett mill site, I see two kinds of ferns still green and much in fruit, apparently the Aspidium spinulosum (?) and cristatum (?). They are also common in other swamps now.

They are quite fresh in those cold and wet places and almost flattened down now. The atmosphere of the house is less congenial to them. In the summer you might not have noticed them. Now they are conspicuous amid the withered leaves. 


You are inclined to approach and raise each frond in succession, moist, trembling, fragile greenness. They linger thus in all moist clammy swamps under the bare maples and grape-vines and witch-hazels, and about each trickling spring which is half choked with fallen leaves. 


What means this persistent vitality, invulnerable to frost and wet? Why were these spared when the brakes and osmundas were stricken down? They stay as if to keep up the spirits of the cold-blooded frogs which have not yet gone into the mud; that the summer may die with decent and graceful moderation, gradually.


 Is not the water of the spring improved by their presence? They fall back and droop here and there, like the plumes of departing summer, — of the departing year.


 Even in them I feel an argument for immortality. Death is so far from being universal. The same destroyer does not destroy all. How valuable they are (with the lycopodiums) for cheerfulness. Greenness at the end of the year, after the fall of the leaf, as in a hale old age. 


To my eyes they are tall and noble as palm groves, and always some forest noble-ness seems to have its haunt under their umbrage. Each such green tuft of ferns is a grove where some nobility dwells and walks. All that was immortal in the swamp's herbage seems here crowded into smaller compass, the concentrated greenness of the swamp. 


How dear they must be to the chickadee and the rabbit! The cool, slowly retreating rearguard of the swamp army. 

What virtue is theirs that enables them to resist the frost?  October 31, 1857


November 15.  To Grackle Swamp.  A very fine snow falling, just enough to whiten the bare spots a little. I go to look for evergreen ferns before they are covered up. The end of last month and the first part of this is the time. I do not know that I find more than one kind now in that swamp, and of that the fertile fronds are mostly decayed. All lie flat, ready to be buried in snow . . . Gossamer, methinks, belongs to the latter part of October and first part of November; also the . . . evergreen ferns. November 15, 1858 

November 17. As for the evergreen ferns, I see now —Common polypody (though shrivelled by cold where exposed). Asplenium trichomanes. A. ebeneum. Aspidium spinulosum (?) large frond, small-fruited, in swamp southeast Brister’s Spring, on 16th. A. cristatum (?), Grackle Swamp on the 15th, with oftener what I take to be the narrower and more open sterile frond. A. marginale (common). A. achrostichoides (terminal shield).  The first one and the last two are particularly handsome, the last especially, it has so thick a frond. November 17, 1858 


See also 
A Book of the Seasons, by Henry Thoreau, The Evergreen Ferns, Part One: Maidenhair and Ebony Spleenwort;

Evergreen wood ferns –
plumes of departing summer,
the departing year.

A Book of the Seasons
,  by Henry Thoreau, The Evergreen Ferns, Part Two: 
Aspidium spinulosum  & Aspidium cristatum

A Book of the Seasons,  by Henry Thoreau
 "A book, each page written in its own season,
out-of-doors, in its own locality."

 ~edited, assembled and rewritten by zphx ©  2009-2024

https://tinyurl.com/hdt-woodferns

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