Fern Fever | Evolve Back

It’s not a cool alliteration I made up. Fern fever was a trendy phrase in the 1800s in the United Kingdom and America. A phrase that, in today’s form, as #FernFever would have millions of followers on Instagram. A phrase that someone would use to describe their latest hobby with a guilty giggle, much the same way people today describe their personality quirks with terms like OCD. And like selfies, the obsession broke all age, class and gender barriers. Much like selfies, it was also seen as a nuisance. The term was, after all, coined with a sense of worry over the society’s mindlessness, the way psychology experts write about Internet addiction today.

It started with a botanist named Nathaniel Ward who discovered that ferns, those wild plants with beautiful foliage found only in remote wilderness, could at last be grown indoors in a glass case like a terrarium. Fern collecting and ‘ferneries’ then became an obsessive preoccupation in Victorian England where every garden wanted a piece of fern. Men and women went fern hunting across England. Some took it as far as the tropical islands exporting new species of ferns back to Europe. Some smuggled them in because collectors paid an arm and a leg for exotic species in the ‘black market’. Some fell over cliffs trying to collect ‘rare’ wild specimens. Some ferns were driven out of existence into extinction. The craze eventually died down, but not before establishing ferns as one of the most common ornamental garden plant across the world.

Makes one wonder what is so fascinating about ferns? They have no flowers, no seeds, and some have no roots even! It’s hard to fathom that a pretty frond of leaves could seize our imagination at this scale. But you’ve got to admit, this humble proto-plant has character. As an essential element of a landscape, it defines its habitat single-handedly. Only other species that can compare and compete are gigantic trees – the redwood, cedar, pine or sal.

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