#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream
Sunday Sanctuary
A Fern A Field A Flower A Feather
Notes, A Few, On Self-Forgetting:
Not yet in bloom: milkweed in the field
On the forest floor: An owl feather
Everywhere in the forest: Ferns unfurling
Fern Fever
[From 1855]:
“Pteridomania or Fern-Fever was a craze for ferns. Victorian decorative arts presented the fern motif in pottery, glass, metal, textiles, wood, printed paper, and sculpture, with ferns “appearing on everything from christening presents to gravestones and memorials”
Pteridomania, meaning Fern Madness or Fern Craze, a compound of Pteridophytes and mania, was coined in 1855 by Charles Kingsley in his book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore:
Your daughters, perhaps, have been seized with the prevailing ‘Pteridomania’...and wrangling over unpronounceable names of species (which seem different in each new Fern-book that they buy)...and yet you cannot deny that they find enjoyment in it, and are more active, more cheerful, more self-forgetful over it, than they would have been over novels and gossip, crochet and Berlin-wool.[1]”
"Gathering Ferns" (Helen Allingham) from The Illustrated London News, July 1871. (Alteration by Kelly DuMar)