THE PLANT THAT MADE VICTORIANS GO WILD

AS WELL AS AN UNRIVALLED COLLECTION OF BOTANICAL BOOKS, THE DANIEL SOLANDER LIBRARY BOASTS AN IMPRESSIVE PTERIDOMANIA COLLECTION. MIGUEL GARCIA REPORTS.

Many Australians can recount the cautionary tale of tulipmania – the fascinating Dutch fad that saw tulip bulb prices reach extraordinarily heights in the 1600s before a speculative bubble dramatically burst. Far fewer are familiar with pteridomania, yet this strange botanical phenomenon lasted from the 1840s until the early years of the 20th century and Australian flora played a leading role.

Pteridomania – a term coined in 1855 by The Water Babies author Charles Kingsley in his book Glaucus, or the Wonders of the Shore – literally means ‘an excessive enthusiasm for ferns’, and that is exactly what gripped the Victorian world.

Ferns have enjoyed a long association with fairies, magic and the more primeval aspects of nature. They have also been used to treat a variety of maladies, including asthma, kidney complaints and even hair loss. During the Enlightenment the scientific study of ferns advanced but was challenged by the practical problem of supplementing the United Kingdom’s locally available species of ferns with exotic ones for comparison. The problem was the survival rate of live plants, with only about 2% of ferns surviving arduous sea voyages.

Then in 1829 Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, a physician and naturalist, discovered that a sealed glass bottle with earth and moisture could serve as a microenvironment in which ferns and other plants flourished. Ward and George Loddiges, a nurseryman and botanist, began experimenting with structures made of glass and wooden frames and by 1831 they had grown 30 fern species in what would popularly be known as “Wardian cases”. Their work sparked a revolution in the transport of live plants from all over the world. During the Victorian era, botany became one of the most popular scientific fields within British society, spurred by colonialisation and a desire to collect and classify the natural world. This resulted in the rapid development of gardening, landscaping, glasshouses and terrariums, as well as a growing enthusiasm for collecting and pressing flowers.

Besides being a fern lover, Loddiges was a keen businessman, and he sought to attract visitors to his hothouse by actively encouraged the idea that ferns appealed only to intelligent people and could improve virility and mental health. When in 1840 these claims were supported by his neighbour, botanist Edward Newman, in his popular book, A History of British Ferns, the stage was set for nationwide phenomenon.

Ferns appeared everywhere – inscribed on glass, textiles, pottery and wood. Iron gates, chandeliers and fire grates were built to resemble fern fronds and leaves. Live ferns hung over dining tables and even inside theatres. The Victorian home was full of fern motifs, their images adorning furniture, rugs, garden benches, dresses and even tombstones.

People personally collected or bought from nurseries. They cultivated the rarest specimens, placing them inside increasingly elaborate hothouses and magnificent terrariums. Fern collecting was one of very few hobbies to transcend class: farmers and shop owners were as likely as aristocrats and scientists to be avid collectors. Indeed, the aristocracy encouraged the poor and the mentally ill to take up the ennobling hobby, and thus ‘elevate’ themselves.

As a result, amateur botanists across Britain armed themselves with field guides and set forth to fossick for new species in the countryside. Prim Victorian hostesses even abandoned tea parties for organised fern-hunting parties. Botany was in fact one of the few socially acceptable activities open to women who wanted to experience adventure, and do so unchaperoned.

Literature was not exempt, with up to 400 books on ferns published during the era. Besides Newman’s bestselling book there was The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland by Thomas Moore and Henry Bradbury in 1855, which offered illustrations made from pressing ferns onto thin lead plates, the resulting images showing every detail, including the fine hairs on the stems and the spore caps on leaves.

Collecting ferns also required a place to propagate and display them – a fernery. This was usually a glasshouse, but also enclosed and shaded garden plantings such as the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney’s own example. And of course, the display of ferns could be personalised and kept almost indefinitely by pressing and drying collected specimens into decorative albums – the ferns often displayed in bouquet like patterns with peat moss to hide the cut stems. It didn’t take to long for this fad to be commercialised, with companies such as the New Zealand Fern Album making beautiful, polished wood -covered books featuring exotic species.

As always, such endeavours came with a cost. As the craze continued, prices increased, and particular species became more difficult to find. A nonBritish species could cost up to the Victorian equivalent of 1,000 pounds. The demand for new species led to professional fern hunters going to the West Indies, Panama and Honduras. Some collectors even turned to the underworld, with fern stealing crimewaves plaguing the British countryside for decades.

As a result, the wild populations of some rarer fern species, such as the Killarney Fern (Vandenboschia speciosa) and Scotland’s Oblong Woodsia (Woodsia ilvensis), were sent to the brink of extinction. Pteridomania also spread to Australia. In Queensland, for instance, epiphytic ferns like Staghorns (Platycerium superbum) and Bird's Nests (Asplenium australasicum) were stripped from the wild and used as popular decorative pieces in private and public spaces, including Parliament House and railway stations.

The fern craze finally faded with the outbreak of World War I, but the legacy of the era is recorded in the Daniel Solander Library’s Pteridomania collection – a series of more than 20 professional and amateur fern albums, featuring a variety of display techniques. As well as copies of the aforementioned works by Newman, and Moore and Bradbury, there are albums from noted historical Australian figures, such as the New South Wales Premier J.T. Lang.