"But on St. John's mysterious night, Confest the mystic fern seed fell."
This enabled its possessor to walk invisible.
"We have the receipt for fern-seed, We walk invisible." SHAKESPEARE.
The word brake or bracken is one of the many plant names from which some of our English surnames are derived, as Brack, Breck, Brackenridge, etc., and fern (meaning the bracken) is seen in Fern, Fearns, Fernham, Fernel, Fernside, Farnsworth, etc. Also, in names of places as Ferney, Ferndale, Fernwood, and others. Although the bracken is coarse and common, it makes a desirable background for rockeries, or other fern masses. The young ferns should be transplanted in early spring with as much of the long, running rootstock as possible.
Var. _pseudocaudàta_ has longer, narrower and more distant pinnules, and is a common southern form.
Ferns with much divided leaves and short, marginal sori borne at the ends of free-forking veins, on the under side of the reflexed and altered portion of the pinnules, which serves as an indusium. Stipes and branches of the leaves very slender and polished.
(Greek, unwetted, because drops of water roll off without wetting the leaves.)
(1) COMMON MAIDENHAIR. _Adiantum pedatum_
A graceful fern of shady glen and rocky woodland, nine to eighteen inches high, the black, shining stalks forked at the top into two equal, recurved branches, the pinnæ all springing from the upper side. Pinnules triangular-oblong, bearing short sori on their inwardly reflexed margins which form the indusium.
[Illustration: Fruiting Pinnæ of Maidenhair]
The maidenhair has a superficial resemblance to the meadow rue, which also sheds water, but it may be known at once by its black, shining stalks with their divisions all borne on one side. It is indeed a most delicate fern, known and admired by every one. The term maidenhair may have been suggested by the black, wiry roots growing from the slender rootstock, or by the dark, polished stems, or, as Clute explains it, "because the black roots, like hair, were supposed, according to the 'doctrine of signatures' to be good for falling hair, and the plant was actually used in the 'syrup of capillaire'[A] (_Am. Botanist_, November, 1921). While the maidenhair is not very common, it is widely distributed, being found throughout our section, westward to California, and northward to the British Provinces.