[Asplenium spinulosum (spinulose woodfern)
& Asplenium cristatum (crested woodfern)]
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. October 23, 1857
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 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 Two: Aspidium spinulosum & Aspidium cristatum
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